by Tana French
I say, before I know I’m going to, ‘Stop. Just stop.’
It comes out loud. One or two of the floaters lift their heads. I give them a snarl that smacks them straight back down again.
Steve is staring at me. He says, ‘What d’you mean?’
I say, and it takes everything I’ve got to hold my voice down, ‘All this shite is imaginary. Do you seriously not get that? Just about every single thing you’ve said since we got this case has been pulled straight out of your hole. Gangs and affairs and sweet Jesus Christ I don’t even know what—’
‘I’m coming up with theories,’ Steve says. He’s still staring. ‘That’s our job.’
‘Theories, yeah. Not fucking fairy tales.’
‘They’re not—’
‘They are, Moran. That’s all they are. Yeah, sure, all of it’s possible, but there’s not one iota of hard evidence for any of it. Here you are talking my ear off about Aislinn being a fantasist, coming up with stories to make herself feel better about her shite life: you’re doing the same fucking thing.’
Steve is biting down on his lip, shaking his head. I lean in closer, feeling the edge of the desk jam into my ribs, mashing the words into his face. ‘Rory Fallon killed Aislinn Murray because they had some stupid spat and he lost his temper. Breslin and McCann are fucking with me because they want me gone. Desmond Murray has nothing to do with any of it. There’s no thrilling hidden story here, Moran. There’s nothing that’s going to turn you into Sherlock Holmes tracking down the master criminal. You’re a scut-monkey working a shitty little lovers’ tiff, with your shitty squad giving you shite because they’re shiteholes. The end.’
Steve is white around the freckles and breathing hard through his nose. For a second I think he’s going to walk out, but then I realise it’s not humiliation; it’s anger. Steve is furious.
He starts to say something, but I point a finger right in his face. ‘Shut up. And I should’ve known that right from the start – I did know right from the start, only like a fucking fool I let myself get carried away by you and your pretty little story. If there’d been even a sniff of anything good off this case, we’d never have got within a mile of—’
Steve throws himself back in his chair. ‘Ah Jaysus, not this. “Everyone’s out to get me, the world is against me—” ’
‘Don’t you fucking—’
‘It’s like working with an emo teenager. Does nobody understand you, no? Are you going to slam your bedroom door and sulk?’
I can’t work out how he’s managed to live this long, whether he injects bleach into his ear every evening to burn the day out of his head and keep himself innocent. I say, ‘You fucking spoilt little brat.’ That widens Steve’s eyes. ‘All the imagination you’ve got going on, and you just can’t imagine that other people might not have it quite as easy as you.’
‘I know you don’t have it easy. I’m right here, remember? I see it every day. There are people who give you shite. That doesn’t mean that everything that ever happens is just an excuse to throw you to the wolves. You’re not that fucking important.’
We’re forcing our voices into something like calm. From a few yards away, where the floaters are, this would sound like just a routine work discussion. That only makes it more vicious.
‘I get that you want me to be talking bollix, Moran. I get that. It’d make your life a whole lot easier if—’
‘All I want is to stop walking on fucking eggshells. I want to stop turning cartwheels trying to put you in a decent mood, so you won’t bite the head off anyone who comes near us—’
Steve cracking crap jokes when I’m in a fouler, till I give in and throw him the laugh he’s angling for. I thought it was just him liking things to be nice, maybe even him liking me and wanting me to be happy. It hits me like a mouthful of sewer water: he was chivvying me into happy-clappy moods so I wouldn’t kill his chances of buddying up with the lads. And I fell for it, time after time, had a laugh with him and felt better about the world. Steve doing his little dance and his jazz hands; me clapping right along, slack-jawed and grinning.
I say, ‘Now we’re getting somewhere. You’d love to believe you’re trying to save me from myself, but when we get down to it, it’s all about you being in everyone’s good books.’
His head goes back in exasperation. ‘It’s about not making everything ten times harder than it needs to be. For me or for you. Is that so terrible, yeah? Does that make me an awful person?’
‘Don’t do me any favours. You’re aiming for a big group hug and happy ever after, and you might even get them, but we both know it’s not going to happen for me.’
‘No,’ Steve says flatly, ‘it’s not.’ The anger compresses his words into hard chips, slamming down on the desk between us. ‘Because you’re so set on going down in flames, you’d make it happen even if the entire force loved you to bits. You’ll light your own bloody self on fire if you have to. And then you can pat yourself on the back and tell yourself you knew it all along. Congratulations.’
He tries to shove his chair back to his end of the desk, where he can sulk in peace about what a demon bitch I am, but I’m not letting him away with that. I get hold of his wrist, under the edge of the desk. ‘You listen to me,’ I say, barely above a whisper, and I grip hard enough to hurt and have to stop myself gripping harder. Reilly has stopped banging his keyboard and the silence is stuffing my ears, my nose, making it hard to breathe. ‘You arse-licking little fuck. You listen.’
Steve doesn’t flinch or pull away. He stares back at me, eye to eye. Only the line of his mouth says I’m hurting him.
I say, ‘You have no idea how badly I wanted this to be a gang case. You can’t even imagine. Because if it was a gang thing, then that would explain everything that’s been going on. Breslin shoving Rory at us, the gaffer giving us hassle, McCann trying to swipe the old case file, Gary not wanting to be caught anywhere near me: they were trying to protect a bigger investigation, or a bent cop, or the whole lot of them were in the gang’s pocket, I don’t even care. But my mate in Undercover says there’s not a sniff of a gang connection. Nothing.’
Keeping my voice down is hurting my throat, like something swallowed wrong and swelling. ‘Do you get what that means? Breslin and McCann pulled all their crap specifically, deliberately to fuck me up. There’s no other reason. All that bullshit with the roll of fifties and the secret appointments, you really want to know what that was about? Breslin and McCann are no more bent than we are. They wanted me to go chasing after them till I was in too deep to pull back, and then they’d haul me up in front of the gaffer – Look, gaffer, she’s been pulling our financials, she’s been bugging our phones, she’s a lunatic, she’s a danger to the squad . . . Job done: I’d be gone.’ Saying it twists my stomach. I swallowed that shite whole, gobbled it down. ‘And if it’s got that far, if it’s people like Breslin and McCann who I’ve never done anything on, if they’re this serious about getting rid of me, then I’m done, Moran. I’m done. There isn’t a way back. There’s only one way this ends.’
Steve says, quietly and very clearly, ‘Let go of me.’
After a moment I let go of his wrist. I was holding it so hard my fingers are cramped into position. They leave white marks on his skin.
Steve pulls his sleeve down. Then he puts on his coat, picks up his mug books and walks out.
A couple of the floaters lift their heads to watch him go and glance across at me, half curious. I give them a blank stare back and listen to the blood banging at my eardrums. As far as I can tell, I don’t have a partner any more. It feels like everything in the room is jumping and jabbering and mocking me, tiny tinny chants of ha ha ha, because I should have seen this coming all along.
I put my head down and flip paper without seeing it. Words pop out of the blur at random – inconsistent, sample, between – and vanish back into it before I can figure out what they’re for. The room reeks of cleaning fluid, rancid cigarette smoke off someone’s coat, half-
eaten apple left to rot overnight.
It doesn’t hit me all at once. It comes like the slow cold of an IV crawling up a vein.
Steve, pushing from the start for us to gallop off chasing a nonexistent gang angle that could have cost me the case and turned me into a laughing-stock. Steve, who loves to be liked and is longing to belong in Murder, and who could have both in a heartbeat if only I was out of the way. Steve, in the car on the way to the scene, asking if I was going to take up my mate on the offer of the security job.
Steve, wandering off on his own into Aislinn Murray’s kitchen, where he could have texted Creepy Crowley anything he wanted to.
There are stories about Steve. Small stuff, from years back, but people remember. Way back when we were in training college, I heard things: Steve writing half the essays for some inspector’s kid, brown-nosing for good postings down the line. I put most of it down to the farm boys pouting about being beaten by a Dub one step from a skanger, and I didn’t know Steve well enough to care either way. But then, when we were working that first case together, I heard more. Steve screwing over the lead D on a case so he could put some shiny stuff on his own CV, earn himself a payback favour or two, haul himself out of the floater pool into a squad. The guy who told me had an agenda of his own; I took a chance, ignored him and trusted Steve. I was right, that time.
That time, Steve had plenty to gain by sticking with me. He was looking for a way into Murder, starting to panic he was never going to find one. One day of working together, and I found it for him.
We felt right together, I thought. I liked the way, when one of us knocked down the other’s idea, it always led into a new one, not a dead end. I liked how we were starting to know, without thinking, how to balance each other: what angle the other one would take in an interview, when I needed to ease back and let Steve do the work, when to come in and change the note. I liked the way he called me on my crap, not because his ego was tangled in his undies but because the crap was getting in our way. I liked the laughs. Once or twice – more – I caught myself daydreaming like a sappy teenager about our future together: about someday when we would get the decent cases, the genius plans we’d dream up to trap the cunning psychos, the interrogations that would go down in squad history. Big tough Conway going all misty-eyed; how the lads would have laughed.
I was a pushover. By the time I met Steve, Murder had already given me a good going-over; all it took was one bite of comfort, one scrap of loyalty, and I turned sloppy with relief, falling over myself to get Steve onto the squad. Of course working with him felt good; he had every reason to make sure it did. I knew Steve was the king of bending himself into whatever shape you want to see, I watched him do it every day, but I somehow convinced myself that this was different. I make myself want to puke.
He’s got nothing left to gain by sticking with me, not now, and plenty to lose. Keyboards yammering, wind banging the window back and forth in its frame. Every pore in my body is prickling. When I run my hands over my head, my hair doesn’t feel like mine.
I can’t think. I can’t tell if this is batshit paranoia or the bleeding obvious slapping me in the face. Two years of watching my back, watching every step and every word, in fight mode all day every day: my instincts are fried to smoking wisps. For a second I actually try to think of someone I could phone, ask what they think; but even if I wanted to do it, which I don’t, the option isn’t there. Sophie, Gary, Fleas: everyone I think of feels slippery and double, a picture flickering faster than my eyes can focus.
Reilly says something, and him and Stanton burst out laughing, big raw shouts like the lead-up to an attack. I can’t stay in this room any longer. I try Lucy’s mobile: switched off. I rake through paper till I find the contact info for two of Aislinn’s exes – no one’s tracked down the Spanish-student summer fling yet – and shove it in my pocket. Then I put on my coat and leave.
Chapter 11
Aislinn knew how to pick them. Her exes make Rory look like an entire theme park’s worth of thrills and spills. The first guy is an accountant for a software company that had a rough ride through the recession, going by the worn-out carpet and the water stains on the ceiling, but the buzz in the office says things are picking up. He met Aislinn in a sandwich queue when they were nineteen and went out with her for six months, but they both made it clear from the start that they weren’t looking for anything serious; when they got bored they drifted off in their separate directions, no hard feelings and no let’s-stay-friends. He remembers Lucy, vaguely, but they never had any problems and he can’t think of any reason why she would have a grudge against him. He’s nice-looking, in a forgettable way, and he seems like a nice guy; he says Aislinn was a nice girl, they had a nice time together, now he has a nice fiancée who he took for a nice dinner on Saturday night and he’s never even looked Aislinn up on Facebook.
The second ex is maybe half a notch less boring. He works in a call centre, in a massive corporate office building plonked down in a field in the middle of nowhere; someone’s genius business-park idea that got smashed in the crash, or someone’s carefully planned tax loss. Four of the five floors are empty; the fifth has a few dozen drones in one corner, talking too loud because there’s no one to be disturbed. For our chat, the guy brings me to some executive corner office, bare, with a film of dust covering the bed-sized desk. He met Aislinn through Lucy, five years back, when he was still trying to make it as a lighting operator. They had been going out for eight months, and he was starting to think this could be something special, when she dumped him. She said, and he believed her, that it was because she felt the same way: this was getting real, and what with looking after her sick mother, Aislinn didn’t have the spare time or energy for something real. No contact since, not till he saw her on the news two nights back. He drifted out of touch with Lucy, too, when he quit theatre; not on bad terms, they just weren’t particularly close to start with and didn’t bother hanging out any more. On Saturday evening he was at a gig – we’ll check the alibis, but I’m not expecting any surprises. The shock and the sadness and the tinge of wistful might-have-been ring true, but so does the distance: Aislinn was in this guy’s past. He wasn’t chasing her, looking to relight the fire, getting pissed off when he saw her preparing for a date that didn’t include him.
Which is exactly what I expected. The interviews were good ones; I Cool Girled the exes into opening up about stuff they never planned on spilling. None of it is any use to me.
I walk back to my car through wide cold hush, the sound of wind in long grass building up from farther away than I can see, rolling in across the empty fields, over me and on. Normally it would make me edgy – too much nature gives me the creeps – but at last my head has the wiped-clean clarity I was looking for in my run, this morning. For the first time in days, maybe months, I can think.
I can’t shake the feeling that it’s because I’ve run Steve out of it. Without him at my elbow – tugging and yammering and pointing in every direction, peppering me with bits of babble that might or might not mean something and I have to figure out which – I finally have room to see straight. Under all that, all the maybes and the mirages, there are only two things worth seeing.
Rory Fallon, the sad little wimp. He’s it; all there is to this case. That’s why it keeps spitting up great clots of nothing: because there’s nothing else to find.
And the second thing: this is my last case in Murder. I can outmanoeuvre Breslin and McCann and Roche and the whole foaming mob, for one more day, one more week, one more month; but sooner or later I’m going to put a toe wrong, and they’ll have me. I think of a boxer, ducking and weaving away from every punch, faster and faster, till one blink and bang, blackness.
I’m not going to wait for the knockout, give Breslin or Roche or whoever the chance to do his smirking lap of honour around me. I’m going on my own terms. I’ll finish this case and finish it right, tie Rory Fallon down so tight the best defence barrister in the country couldn’t wriggle hi
m free, go out with my head up. Then I’ll ring my mate with the security firm and ask him if that job is still on the table. And somewhere in there, I’m gonna tell O’Kelly to fuck himself and punch Roche’s teeth in.
For a second I wonder whether, while I was getting everything else arseways, I could have got Steve wrong. I wonder – not that it matters now – if this is what he was trying to distract me from, all along; if he didn’t want me to notice that I was done. If the poor optimistic eejit actually liked working with me, just like I thought. If he had the same sappy daydreams, us taking down some Hannibal Lecter together without breaking a sweat, shooting our cuffs and swapping a nod and striding off to the next uncrackable case that needed the best of the best. The twinge that gives me is sharp enough that I hope I’m wrong.
The car is cold. Even after I slam the door, I can still hear that unceasing roll of wind through too much grass. Part of me wants to floor it out of there, but I can’t think of anything I’m in a hurry to reach.
When I get back to the incident room, Steve is still gone. The floaters are eating lunch and bitching about some news story bitching about cops. Breslin is at his desk, with his chair tilted back and his feet up, finishing a sausage roll and flicking through the Courier.
‘Ah,’ he says, bringing his chair legs down and tossing his paper on the desk, when he sees me. ‘Just the woman I’ve been waiting for. Been doing anything interesting?’
‘Aislinn’s exes,’ I say, peeling my coat off. ‘Nothing worth hearing. We’ll check the alibis and cross them off the list.’ The Courier’s front-page headline says who was coming to dinner? Someone’s told Crowley about Aislinn’s date.
Breslin swings his feet off his desk. ‘I need to stretch my legs after that,’ he says, patting his stomach. ‘Let’s go for a stroll.’
‘I’ve got notes to type up.’
‘They can wait.’ Lower: ‘I’ve got something that can’t.’