by Tana French
I ask, ‘Did she ever tell him about Rory? Even a hint?’
‘You mean, to make the point that she had options?’ Lucy shakes her head. ‘No. I thought of that, too. I specifically asked Aislinn – warned her, more like – and she said no way. But I wondered if . . . I told you Joe wanted to be able to look through her phone. I wondered if maybe Ash was leaving a couple of texts from Rory on there. Just so, if Joe went looking . . .’
Which she was. Jesus Christ. I think about banging my head off the coffee table a few times. Naïve didn’t begin to describe this girl.
‘That was what worried me,’ Lucy says, ‘when Ash told me she had invited Rory over for dinner. They could’ve met anywhere, you know? If they wanted a shag, they could’ve gone back to Rory’s. Why go where Aislinn knew Joe might show up?’
I say, ‘Unless she was actually hoping for that.’
‘Yeah. Maybe not even consciously, but she had to know it could happen. And she was getting desperate for this whole thing to be over. Every time she saw Rory, or even talked to him, she got more smitten. Deep down, all she really wanted to do was forget the whole Joe mess had ever happened, and go off and spend twenty-four hours a day snuggling and giggling with Rory. She just couldn’t quite make herself let go of the Joe plan. Maybe part of her was hoping that Joe would call round, see Rory, throw a wobbler and stamp off into the sunset. Make the decision for her.’ Lucy catches the look on my face. We’ve been watching each other for so long, we’re getting good at each other. ‘I know. You think I don’t know? Like I said, she was miles out of her depth. She could’ve genuinely thought it would go down that way. Just that simple.’
Jesus Christ. ‘If only,’ I say.
Lucy says, ‘He did it. Didn’t he? Joe killed Aislinn.’
I say, ‘You need to keep quiet about this whole conversation. No dropping hints to your mates, nothing. Is that clear?’
‘Yeah, it is. I’ve kept quiet about this for months; I’m not going to start yapping now. I just need to know.’
I’m not gonna be McCann, doling out info in prissy little drips only when my all-knowing enlightened self has determined that it’s for someone’s own good. ‘Yeah,’ I say. ‘I’m pretty sure he did.’
Lucy puts a knuckle to her mouth and nods for a long time. This wasn’t a surprise, but hearing it out of my mouth changes it. It takes her a while to get used to.
She asks, ‘Was it on purpose? Was he actually trying to kill her, or was it something where he just snapped and didn’t realise . . . ?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Has he ever done anything like this before? I mean, not exactly like this, obviously, but—’
I say, ‘You mean, should you have seen this coming.’
‘Yeah.’
‘I wouldn’t have,’ I say, ‘and I know McCann a lot better than you do. I’ve never heard even a hint of a rumour about him smacking his wife around, or giving a suspect the slaps – and we all know who does that, when they can get away with it, and who doesn’t. He’s not a violent guy.’
‘The thing is, I was scared this would blow up. I said to Aislinn . . .’ Lucy catches a tight breath. ‘Back in September, when she told me she’d got Joe into bed. I asked her – we were in the Flowing Tide, but it was noisy enough that we could talk – I said, “Have you told him I’m your best friend?” She said no, they hadn’t really talked about anything except Joe and his general amazingness. I said, “Then don’t. Please. Make sure you tell him I’m just someone you go for drinks with, every now and then.” Ash was like, “Why? I’m not going to pretend you don’t matter to me.” ’ Lucy’s eyes close for a second on that. ‘But I told her, “When you pull the trigger, he’s going to be raging. He’s not going to just go away and sob into his pint. You’ll be in Peru or wherever, seeing Machu Picchu and shagging gorgeous backpackers; he won’t be able to get to you. But if he knows I’m your best friend, he’ll know he can get to you by doing things to me.” ’
‘“Things,” ’ I say. ‘What were you worried he’d do?’
‘I didn’t even get as far as specifics. I just . . . Me on my own in this flat, you know? A Guard could do whatever he wanted: plant anything, do anything. I didn’t want to find out. I figured I was safest staying far away from the whole drama.’ Lucy’s head goes back. That dry flick of a laugh, up at the ceiling. That hasn’t gone to plan. ‘But that wasn’t even the real point. The point was, I needed to get it through to Ash: This isn’t a game. I’m genuinely frightened that you’re doing something that’s actually, real-life dangerous. I knew she didn’t give a fuck that she was taking risks, but I thought maybe if she realised she could be putting me at risk as well, she might pay attention.’
‘But even that didn’t get through.’
‘Nope.’ A small jerky shrug. Even through everything else, that still stings. ‘Aislinn said sure, OK, she’d drop in a mention of me, make sure Joe thought I was just some sort-of-friend left over from school. But she was only doing it to shut me up. She didn’t think it was important. Like I said: all she could hear was the story in her head. Anything outside that was just . . .’ Lucy makes a yappy-mouth sign with one hand. ‘Just noise. And I should’ve known that.’
‘Aislinn had got herself in deep,’ I say. ‘You did your best.’
She shakes her head like I don’t get it. ‘No. Where I went wrong was, I never thought of this. I knew Aislinn was playing with fire, and I knew Joe was the wrong guy to pull this shite on – someone who thinks he’s got the right to decide whether or not you know where your own father’s gone, how’s he going to react when someone else does the same thing to him? But I never thought of this. I thought maybe when Ash dumped him he might hit her, yeah. But mainly I was worried that he’d decide to fuck up her life. Have her arrested for some bogus reason, land her in jail, make her spend years and thousands of quid fighting made-up charges, then start all over again. That was what I thought, when you guys showed up here on Sunday: that Joe had called round to Aislinn’s, he’d seen Rory there, and he’d found some way to have her arrested for something.’
‘Makes sense,’ I say. ‘That’s what I would’ve worried about, too.’
‘And instead it was this.’ Lucy has her fingers wound in the fringe of the throw, so tight they’ve gone white and lumpy. ‘And now I keep wondering . . . what if I’d said the opposite to Aislinn, that night? If I’d said, “You make sure Joe knows how close we are.” If he’d known that Ash was probably telling me the whole story. Do you think he’d have . . . ? Would he have stopped himself from . . . ?’
It would have made no difference. The split second where McCann decided to throw that punch was too small to fit any calculations. But I need Lucy feeling guilty.
‘No way to tell,’ I say. ‘And no point in beating yourself up over it now. You just do everything you can to help me get him.’
Lucy’s eyes come up to meet mine. She says bluntly, ‘You said the other detectives want you out. Are you going to be around to get him?’
I say, ‘I never have given one solitary fuck what the other detectives want.’
‘Seriously. Because I’m not going to go in there and sign a statement about all this, and maybe have Joe fucking up my life, if it’s not even going to do any good.’
I say, ‘I can’t guarantee you that McCann will go to prison. Even with your evidence, we’ve got maybe a fifty-fifty shot. But what I can guarantee you is that, if you put what you’ve told me into an official statement, his life won’t just go back to the way it was. I’m gonna make absolutely fucking sure of that, and I’m not going anywhere till it’s done. Is that good enough?’
After a moment Lucy lets out her breath and pulls her fingers free of the throw fringe. ‘I guess it’ll have to be,’ she says.
‘You’ve got my card,’ I say. ‘I seriously doubt McCann’s gonna come after you; it’d be too risky and it wouldn’t do him a lot of good, now that you’ve talked to me, plus he’s gonna have other stuff o
n his mind. But if anything happens that worries you, if anyone gives you hassle or even if something just strikes you as weird, you ring me. Yeah?’
She nods, flexing her fingers to get the blood back into them, but I’m not sure she’s really heard me. ‘I wanted Ash to have that happy-ever-after ending,’ she says. ‘I really did. Even if it was a million miles away, with that backpacker in Machu Picchu. She deserved it. But it’s like she wasn’t able to want that for herself, not till she got Joe out of her way. She could barely even see the happy ending. That’s how huge he was in her head.’
‘Or else she saw it just fine,’ I say, ‘and she wanted it, but she wanted to get Joe even more.’ This shrink-style crap is making me antsy, or maybe that’s just from sitting still hearing about people’s stupid sides when there’s shit I need to be doing. I get up. ‘I’ll be in touch when I need you to come in and give your statement. Till then: thanks. I mean it.’
Lucy makes a small worn noise that could be a laugh. ‘Look at that,’ she says. ‘Here we are, you and me, getting Ash what she wanted all along. I guess this was one way to get it.’
She walks me to the door of the flat, but she shuts it behind me fast, without coming downstairs. Lucy’s got some crying to do. Me, I’ve got nothing to do except head down the lopsided stairs that smell of soup and dead flowers, with Lucy’s story hammering inside my head while I try to work out what the hell I’m gonna do with it.
Chapter 16
I get in my car and check my messages – phones go on mute during interviews, or Sod’s Law says your ma will ring. Text from Sophie: Got DNA profile from fluids on mattress. Male, not in system. Get me sample from your suspect we’ll run comparison. Steve’s sent me an audio file of Breslin explaining to him how much potential he has and how he should be sure not to throw it away. Random Google Blonde has another four million depressing messages from the various dating sites. I delete her accounts.
I text Steve: Ring me. Then I sit there, running the heat to try and thaw my feet after Lucy’s flat, and watch the people going past. They make me edgy. Dozens and dozens of people, they just keep coming, and every single one of their heads is crammed with stories they believe and stories they want to believe and stories someone else has made them believe, and every story is battering against the thin walls of the person’s skull, drilling and gnawing for its chance to escape and attack someone else, bore its way in and feed off that mind too. Even the cute little student mincing along in her flowery dress, the shuffling old fella with his shuffling spaniel, they look Ebola-lethal. I don’t know what the fuck is wrong with me. Maybe I’m getting the flu.
It’s eleven minutes of this before my phone lights up with Steve’s name. ‘Hey,’ I say. ‘Can you talk?’
‘Yeah. Not for long; I’m supposed to be talking to the staff in the newsagent. Breslin’s only across the road, in the bakery. You get the file?’
‘Yeah,’ I say. ‘Listen. Once I showed Lucy that note from Aislinn, it took her about a quarter of a second to ID the mystery boyfriend. Only it wasn’t Breslin.’
Before Steve can ask what the hell, it hits him. ‘Jesus. McCann?’
‘Bingo.’
‘What the . . . ? Why?’
I give him the fast version. At the end he says, after a moment of silence, ‘Oh Jesus.’ His voice sounds raw.
‘Yeah, we can do that part later. You got anything I should know?’
Steve says, ‘My guy at the mobile company e-mailed me. Full records on the phone that called it in.’
‘Anything to prove it’s Breslin’s?’
‘No. All the other numbers trace back to journalists. Including—’ I know what’s coming. I say it with him: ‘Crowley.’
Breslin, the little shit. He’s been top of the rat list from the get-go, but it still gives me a quick hit of anger. ‘Let me guess,’ I say. ‘Early Sunday morning.’
‘Quarter to seven.’
That pulls a hard crack of laughter out of me. ‘And then he came in and gave us a lecture about squad loyalty. What a load of bollix. Breslin figured if the pressure around this case got turned up high enough, I’d sign off on Rory Fallon just to get it off my desk. He knew that little cocksucker Crowley would jump on the chance to give me shite, and he shoved me straight under Crowley’s wheels. Gave Crowley the scoop, told him to go all out: hints that I wasn’t up to the job, photos that made me look like a raving lunatic. The bleeding shitehawk.’
‘Sounds about right,’ Steve says. The tight-wound note to his voice means something’s at him, but my mind’s not on that. My Crowley problem didn’t begin on Sunday morning.
‘When were the other calls from that phone to Crowley?’ I ask.
‘There’s just the one call. Eight to other journos, over the last year or so, but just the Sunday-morning one to Crowley.’
Crowley’s magic appearances started last summer, and there’ve been four or five of them since. If Breslin’s been using that phone to run his journos, he’s not the one who’s been running Crowley into my scenes; not until this one. Me sulking at my desk, convinced everything about this case was part of a big dark conspiracy against me. I feel like a gobshite all over again.
‘Here’s the thing,’ Steve says. His voice has tightened another notch. ‘How’d Breslin know we had the case?’
‘Because he’d called it in to Stoneybatter almost two hours earlier. Even allowing for delays, paramedics, uniforms, whatever, it had to be hitting the squad by then.’
‘No. How’d he know it was you and me? Crowley’s a cute hoor; he knows the score. He wouldn’t give serious trouble to O’Neill, say, or Winters, if one of them had pulled the case; he wouldn’t want to burn his bridges with them and all their mates. You and I are the only ones he’d be willing to hassle. Ringing Crowley wouldn’t have done Breslin any good, unless he already knew the case was going to us. And the gaffer only gave it to us just before seven.’
The silence lands hard. Down the line between me and Steve I hear wind, and a faraway kid screaming, and the hiss of emptiness.
‘Maybe Breslin knew we were on night shift,’ I say. ‘He knows the gaffer always throws us the domestics . . .’
I can hear in my own voice how weak it is. Steve says, ‘How’d he know the case wouldn’t come in ten minutes later and go to one of the day shift?’
The squad room, waiting in cold early light for the day to begin. O’Kelly tossing the call sheet on my desk: I picked it up on my way in, said I’d bring it upstairs to save Bernadette the hassle . . . I say, and my voice sounds calm and clean and very strange, ‘Breslin had talked to the gaffer.’
Steve says, ‘Can you think of any other way he could have known?’
‘Is there a call to the gaffer in the phone log?’
‘No. He must’ve used his regular phone for that. He knew we’d trace the Stoneybatter call; he wasn’t going to have the gaffer’s number showing up on that same phone. He couldn’t do anything about the calls to journos, but anyone can ring journos, and we can’t make them reveal their sources; he figured those wouldn’t come back on him.’
O’Kelly scanning the roster, hands in his pockets, rocked back on his heels. You’ll need backup on this one. Breslin’s due in. Have him.
I say, ‘The gaffer knew all along. He put Breslin on the case to keep an eye on us.’
‘Yeah,’ Steve says. ‘Yeah. Fuck, Antoinette.’
We can’t afford to get angry or wired or anything else, not now. ‘Keep it together,’ I say sharply.
I hear Steve blow out a long breath. ‘I know.’
‘What time are you and Breslin gonna be back at the squad?’
‘We’re pretty near done here. Say forty-five minutes, an hour max.’
‘I’ll throw him a ball to chase. When he heads off, meet me in the garden outside HQ.’
‘OK. Gotta go.’ And Steve hangs up.
The people going past the car seem like they’re speeding up, driven along by that unstoppable savage thrumming in
side their heads. I still have that off-kilter feeling like a fever starting. I can’t afford the flu today, any more than I can afford to lose the head.
I need to head out to Stoneybatter, but first I set my phone number to Private, ring the General Unit and ask them, in a timid little girly voice with a nice middle-class accent, if I could please talk to Detective Breslin about Aislinn Murray who got murdered. They put me through to the Murder Squad; when Bernadette answers and tells me Detective Breslin is out and she’ll get someone else for me, I get all nervy and say no, no thanks, but could I maybe leave him a message? And she pats me on the head, more or less, and puts me through to Breslin’s voicemail.
‘This is Detective Don Breslin.’ Smooth as a coffee ad. He probably did a dozen takes. ‘Leave a message and I’ll get back to you.’ Beep.
I keep my mouth a few inches from the phone, just in case. ‘Um, hi. My name’s . . . um, I don’t really want to . . . But I’m a friend of Simon Fallon – I heard you were asking him about his brother Rory? And – I mean, I used to hang out with Rory as well, and he did some things that probably you should . . . I never reported it, but . . . Simon said you were really nice. I’m in the Top House bar, in Howth? In beside the fireplace? If maybe you could come here? I can probably stay till like four. Otherwise, I guess I can try you some other time, or . . . Well. Thanks. Bye.’
I put my phone away and floor it for Stoneybatter. That should do it. Breslin’ll get in, check his messages, cream his Armani suit, turn right around and zoom off to find out what terrible things Rory did to this poor girl. He’ll leave Steve behind, in case she can’t bring herself to spill her story to two big bad Ds at once. Forty minutes to Howth, at this time of day and in this weather. Say half an hour of waiting for Mystery Chick, or till four o’clock if we’re really in luck. Then forty minutes back. For at least two hours, me and Steve will have McCann all to ourselves.