by Tana French
I set up accounts using a throwaway e-mail address, Aislinn’s description and a smirking blonde from Google Images, just in case our man has a type and goes looking for a replacement girlfriend, and I poke around for a while. The sites mostly use handles, not names – j-wow79, footballguy12345 – and Aislinn’s description matches half the girls on there. I filter for age and type and skim the sea of duckfaced blond selfies till my eyes bubble, but there’s no sign of her. I believe in been positive in life whats for us wont pass us by lol . . . I like romance, spontaneity, respect, honesty, genuineness, good conversation . . . Looking to chat n just go with the flow message me you never know what might happen!!!
The pasta thing has gone cold and slimy. I shove down the last mouthful anyway. Outside the window my street is dark, the streetlamps fighting the night and losing. The wind is punching around a paper bag from the chipper, slamming it up against a wall, holding it there for a second before tossing it down the road again. The old one from Number 12 hurries past, pushing her tartan shopping trolley, headscarf bent low.
I switch to the guys’ photos and scan for a face that’s familiar from work or from news stories: nothing, not that a high-profile gangster is gonna upload his pic on some dating site. First time on a site like this not really sure what to say, looking for someone easy going no drama good sense of humour . . . I’m a bit mad will say anything just a wild n crazy guy so if u think u can handle me give me a text!!
These people are pissing me off. The neediness of it, all of them jumping up and down and waving their arms and doing their cutest little booty-shakes for the internet: Me, look at me, like me, please oh please want me!!! The because-I’m-worth-it shower (Looking for someone tall, slim, very fit, no smokers, no drugs, no kids, no pets, must have full-time job and own car, must like fusion cuisine, speak at least three languages, enjoy bikram yoga and acid jazz . . .) are just as bad: ordering their relationships from the online menu because of course you have to have one, same as you have to have a state-of-the-art sound system and a pimped-out new car, and it’s important to make sure you get exactly what you want. The only ones I can respect are the ones there on business: Ukrainian superbabes looking for older men down the country, with a view to marriage. All the rest could do with a good kick up the hole and a double shot of self-respect.
No one needs a relationship. What you need is the basic cop-on to figure that out, in the face of all the media bullshit screaming that you’re nothing on your own and you’re a dangerous freak if you disagree. The truth is, if you don’t exist without someone else, you don’t exist at all. And that doesn’t just go for romance. I love my ma, I love my friends, I love the bones of them. If any of them wanted me to donate a kidney or crack a few heads, I’d do it, no questions asked. And if they all waved goodbye and walked out of my life tomorrow, I’d still be the same person I am today.
I live inside my own skin. Anything that happens outside it doesn’t change who I am. This isn’t something I’m proud of; as far as I’m concerned, it’s a bare minimum baseline requirement for calling yourself an adult human being, somewhere around the level of knowing how to do your own washing or change a toilet roll. All those idiots on the websites, begging for other people to pull their sagging puppet-strings, turn them real: they make me want to spit.
I’ve got two private messages already. Hi what’s the crack?? So check out my profile tell me if u wanna chat. The kid is twenty-three and works in IT, which makes him an unlikely candidate for Aislinn’s top-secret squeeze. Hello beautiful woman, I’d love to know what’s under that stunning exterior. Me: spiritually evolved, very creative, world traveller, people tell me I should really write a novel about my life. Intrigued? Let’s share more. I recognise the profile shot: back when I was in uniform, I arrested the guy for wanking on a bus. Small city. I make a note to check out what he’s been at lately, when I get a spare moment, but it doesn’t feel urgent: there’s no reason why Lucy would have gone squirrelly about this little creep.
I’ve hit the stage where the screen is warping and sliding in front of my eyes. I throw back the last of the cold coffee. Then I log into a very old e-mail account and hit Compose.
Hiya hun, how’s tricks? Too long no see – love to catch up whenever your free. Let me know. Seeya soon – Rach xx
The ‘From’ address says rachelvodkancoke. I read it again. Don’t hit Send.
The light in the room shifts: the motion-sensor lamps out the back have clicked on. I get up, kill the inside lights and move to the side of the kitchen window.
Nothing: just my patio. The white light and the tossing shadows turn it sinister: bare paving stones, high walls, the spreading tracing where an ivy plant used to be and the dark looming up all around. For a second I think I see something move over the back wall, the top of a head bobbing out in the laneway. When I blink, it’s gone.
My heart is going hard. I think of Aislinn: young single woman, cottage in Stoneybatter, rear access via a laneway. Of the intruder who did a legger over her patio wall when he got spotted. I think of that spunkbubble Crowley splashing my photo across his front page, just in case anyone felt like waiting outside Dublin Castle and following me home.
I switch off the patio lights and check my gun. Then I slam my back door open, lunge across the patio, get a toehold on the wall and throw myself up onto the top.
I’m all ready to come face to face with anything from a junkie to Freddy Kruger. Instead I get the narrow laneway, dim in the faint yellow light from the streetlamp out on the road, and empty. Shadows and crisp packets banked along the edges, some kid’s fourth-rate tag scrawled in blue on the wall. I listen: what could be fast footsteps, somewhere out on the road, or could be just the wind bouncing rubbish.
The kick of anger is half letdown – I was starving for that fight – and half at myself for being a moron. Even if this case magically turns out to be some serial killer’s warm-up, tonight he’s at home having some hard-earned R&R, not out looking for high-grade action. The bobbing head in the laneway was either fatigue warping my vision or some drunk having a piss; my motion sensor got tripped by the wind messing with rubbish, or the local half-wild cat on the scrounge.
I go back to my laptop. I sit there with my finger on the button for a long time, listening to the wind move outside my house and keeping one eye on the kitchen for the patio lights, before I hit Send.
Chapter 6
First thing Monday morning, I get to track down my witness from the scumbagfest, haul him out of bed and coax him into coming in to the squad to give his statement all over again, this time with narky jabs about how he pays my wages – via the dole, somehow – and how I should have more respect than to go wasting his time like this. We both know that if I tell him to shut his face, he’ll develop a bad case of amnesia about Saturday night. Even this little fucker can smell weakness off me. A couple of slaps would sort out his attitude, but I make myself save them for someone who matters.
Only half my mind is on him anyway. The day started off strange. It was still dark when I was leaving my gaff, thick cold fog filling the road, rolling it back to its secretive Victorian self: cars faded to smudges, lit windows and streetlamps hanging in the middle of nothing. And a guy at the top of the road, just standing there, on a morning when no sane person would be just standing. He was too far away for me to catch much; just a tall guy, facing my way, with a dark overcoat and a dark trilby and a set to his shoulders that said he wasn’t young. Last night’s adrenaline shot hit me again. I thought of the report on the guy climbing over Aislinn’s wall: medium build, dark coat, the neighbour thought he might be middle-aged . . . By the time I manoeuvred my car out of the parking space and gunned it up the road, he was gone.
What sent something extra through me, what leaves me edgy and watching cars in my rear-view mirror all the way to the car pool and to the scumbag’s place and back to work with him whining in the back seat, was the overcoat. Steve was right, there are a lot of guys who wear dark overcoat
s. They include just about every D I know.
There are a few reasons why a D could be staking out my road. Some of them are a lot more fun than others.
Just to brighten my day, Creepy Crowley is still trying to pump Aislinn into the story of the year. He’s dug up a couple more photos of her – all post-makeover; Crowley and his readers don’t get into a panting lather over dumpy brunettes in polyester skirt-suits – and a flood of hot-button clichés to pour over them, and he’s got the front page of the Courier all to himself. A fair bit of it is hints about the cops, specifically me, not taking this seriously because we’re too busy protecting the politicians and the elite to care about decent working people. Crowley has somehow got hold of a blurry shot of me back in uniform, policing a protest; the protest was a couple of hundred people rightfully pissed off about an emergency room closing and there was zero aggro, but there I am with a stab vest and a baton, which is all Crowley needs to prove his point. Unless we make the collar soon, the brass are gonna start feeling the pressure, they’re gonna kick the gaffer, and the gaffer is gonna kick me.
I walk the scumbag witness out – he’s still bitching about his ruined lie-in – and watch him light a smoke and slope off. It’s headed for ten o’clock; the day is as strong as it’s going to get, all feeble grey light choked with cloud. I lean against the wall outside, ignoring the cold biting through my suit jacket, and ring Sophie while I’ve got some privacy. I figure a drug lord’s fat fingerprint in Aislinn’s bedroom, or even a nice bloodstain on one of Rory’s gloves, would do a lot to put my day on the right track.
‘Hey,’ Sophie says. ‘OK if I put you on speaker? This vase needs to make it back to Galway in one piece for the O’Flaherty case, and I swear the idiots on evidence transport use this stuff for football practice, so I’m packing it myself. In a year’s supply of bubble wrap. I’m in my office, so no one’s going to hear us.’
‘Sure,’ I say. ‘You got the stuff from our suspect, yeah?’
‘Yeah. The grey nylon gloves and black wool coat he was wearing, and navy-blue trousers, two white linen shirts, a pale blue pullover, red wool gloves, wool Fair Isle gloves – seriously – and black wool scarf from his flat. Plus fingerprints.’ Sophie does something that sounds like ripping off a piece of gaffer tape. ‘Just so you know: Breslin rang me yesterday evening. He was looking for all the scene reports, plus Aislinn’s electronics.’
The rough stone prods at my back through my jacket. ‘What’d you give him?’
‘What do you think I am? I gave him fuck-all. He came on like a headhunter, telling me how delighted he was that I was working this case, how none of the other techs are up to my standard – what kind of idiot thinks bitching about my mates is going to get on my good side?’ Tape ripping again. ‘I told him none of our reports were ready, what with this case not being the only one in the whole world, and the computer guys hadn’t even started on the electronics. Which was true, or near enough. Breslin wasn’t pleased, but he kept right on schmoozing. I swear, by the end of it I thought he was going to send me flowers.’
‘I’m gonna have a nice chat with Breslin,’ I say. I could kiss Sophie. ‘How far have you actually got?’
‘Reports are ready whenever you want them. I got my guys to work late. I figured if you’re trying to keep this stuff away from that arselick – and I don’t need to know why, I’m just saying – it might be useful if you were a couple of steps ahead of where he’d expect.’
‘It is,’ I say, lifting a mental finger at Breslin. ‘You’re a gem. Find anything good?’
Sophie makes a noise like a shrug. ‘The black fibres on the vic’s body are consistent with your suspect’s coat, but that’s not as special as it sounds: they’re common as muck, they’d probably be consistent with half the black wool coats in this town. No match to his scarf. No blood on any of his stuff – meaning if he is your boy, those aren’t the gloves he was wearing when he did the job. Sorry.’
‘Them’s the breaks,’ I say. No surprise there: even Rory’s bright enough to spot a bin and dump bloody gloves in it. ‘We’ll keep looking. Anything new from the scene?’
‘Most of it you can read in the reports – a load of miscellaneous unidentified fibres, that kind of shite. We’ll cross-check them with fibres from your suspect’s place, in case of secondary transfer – a fibre from his carpet gets on his coat and from there onto her sofa, or wherever – and we’ll check your suspect’s stuff for fibres from the vic’s place, but we haven’t got to that yet. Dammit—’ Rustling and a thump: Sophie fighting with her roll of bubble wrap. ‘There’s just one thing that’s a little on the weird side. The place is clean.’
‘She was having her new fella over for dinner. She cleaned up.’
‘Not that kind of clean. I mean, that too; it looks to me like she was the housekeeping type to begin with – the top of the wardrobe’s got almost no dust on it, that kind of Stepford crap – and then she did a full blitz for her date with Romeo. But I’m talking about fingerprints. You know how Moran wanted me to check the places an ex might’ve touched? The headboard, under the toilet seat?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Nothing. No prints on the headboard, not even the vic’s – and it’s gloss paint, it should hold prints. The doorknobs, the bathroom sink, the toilet seat, the fridge door, the condom packet in her bedside table: nothing but smudges.’
I say, ‘Somebody wiped the place down.’ The ghostly gangster boyfriend is starting to cast a shadow. Gang boys know all about wiping a place down for prints. Rory, who’d never been in that house before, wouldn’t need to.
Sophie makes a noncommittal sound. ‘Maybe. Or maybe Ms Stepford was just hardcore about cleaning. Either one would fit. I figured you’d be interested anyway.’
‘I am,’ I say. ‘Any fluids on the bed?’
‘Yeah. The sheets were clean, but we found stains on the mattress. Could be just her own sweat – you were there; she kept the place tropical – but if we’re lucky, some of it’ll be semen, or at least someone else’s sweat.’ Energetic rustling: Sophie is wrapping another layer around her vase. ‘Even if we get DNA, though, there’s no way to tell when it was deposited. If you can find out when she bought the mattress, you can get an outside limit, but beyond that . . .’
‘Keep me up to speed on the DNA,’ I say. I’m not getting my hopes up; that condom packet says we’ll be lucky if anyone’s semen ever made it onto the mattress. ‘Thanks, Soph. What about Aislinn’s electronics? Anything there?’
‘Most of it’s your basic bullshit. Nothing good on her mobile – searches on clothes shops and nightclubs, cutesy game apps full of fluttery fairies. No one who looks interesting in any of her photos, but I’ll send you copies so you can see for yourself. Her Facebook is all selfies and which-Hunger-Games-character-are-you quizzes and “Repost this if you hate cancer” – what the fuck is that supposed to do? If enough people like the post, cancer’ll just take the hint and become extinct?’
‘Get us the login details, yeah? We need to check out her Facebook friends.’
‘No problem,’ Sophie says. ‘It doesn’t look like she had any best buddies on there – no private messages or anything; it all looks like colleagues and old classmates, the type where you post on their timeline once a year telling them they look amazing in their birthday pic – but knock yourselves out.’
If the gangster boyfriend is out there, he’s doing a nice job of being invisible; but then, he might. ‘What about her e-mail? Any love notes, sex talk, setting up appointments, anything like that? From Rory Fallon or anyone else?’
‘Nothing like that. The Gmail account linked to her phone is full of order confirmations and special offers from fashion sites, mainly. The lovey-doviest it gets is some cousin in Australia who sticks x’s at the end of her e-mails. You still looking at exes?’
‘Keeping an open mind,’ I say. A clot of tourists wander past with their heads tipped back and their jaws hanging, staring up at the Castle buildings. One of
them points a camera in my direction, but I throw him a stare that almost melts his lens, and he backs off.
‘We’re only seeing what she left on there,’ Sophie reminds me. ‘She could have deleted anything that reminded her of the ex. E-mails, texts, photos.’
‘I know.’ Or he could have, on Saturday night. ‘We’ll get onto the phone company and get her records – I’d say Steve’s doing that now. Send me her e-mail account details – cc Steve – and can you talk to her e-mail providers? Get the logs, so we can compare them to what’s actually left on her accounts?’
‘My computer guy’s got friends in high places. I’ll get him onto it as soon as I’ve finished this fucking vase. You should see it: four feet tall, porcelain pug dogs sticking out everywhere, covered in blood spatter. Which actually improves it.’
‘What about my vic’s laptop? Tell me there’s something good on her laptop.’ I’m cold; tasteless instant coffee from the incident-room kettle is starting to sound good.
‘You want interesting evidence, get me an interesting victim. This woman lived a boring life. She spent a lot of time online, but she wasn’t playing in any dodgy corners of the internet, as far as we can tell – my computer guy had a good look through the last couple of months of her history. A lot of time – like, a lot – on travel sites: she was reading up on Australia, India, California, Portugal, Croatia . . . She ran some searches on evening classes in Dublin, looked at arts courses in universities, did a load of shopping for discount designer clothes, read all the coverage on a couple of gangland trials. Desperate for thrills; fuck knows she wasn’t getting them anywhere else.’