Richie kept pace and said nothing, but I was starting to get the hang of his silences. I said, “You think I should be concentrating on how they can help Jenny, not how they can help us. And you think I should have let them go in yesterday.”
“She’s in hell. They’re family.”
I took the stairs fast. “Exactly, old son. E-fucking-xactly. They are family, which means we don’t have a hope of understanding the dynamics there, not yet anyway. I don’t know what a couple of hours with Mum and Sis would have done to Jenny’s story, and I didn’t want to find out. Maybe the mother’s a guilt-tripper, she makes Jenny feel even worse about ignoring the intruder, so when Jenny talks to us she skips over the fact that he broke in a few more times along the way. Maybe Fiona warns her that we were looking at Pat, and by the time we get to Jenny she won’t talk to us at all. And don’t forget: Fiona may not be top of our suspect list, but she’s not off it—not till we find out how our man picked the Spains—and she’s still the one who would have inherited if Jenny had died. I don’t care how badly the vic needs a hug, I’m not letting the heir talk to her before I do.”
“I guess,” Richie said. At the bottom of the stairs he moved aside to let a nurse go past, pushing a trolley of coiled plastic and glinting metal, and watched her bustle down the corridor. “Probably you’re right.”
I said, “You think I’m a cold bastard, don’t you?”
He shrugged. “Not for me to say.”
“Maybe I am. It depends on your definition. Because you see, Richie, to me, a cold bastard is someone who could look Jenny Spain in the eye and tell her, Sorry, ma’am, we won’t be catching the person who butchered your family, because I was too busy making sure everybody liked me, see you around, and then waltz off home for a nice dinner and a good night’s sleep. That’s something I can’t do. So if I have to do some minor cold shit along the way, to make sure that doesn’t happen, so be it.” The exit doors juddered open, and a wave of cool rain-drenched air rolled over us. I crammed as much of it into my lungs as I could.
Richie said, “Let’s talk to the uniform now. Before the ma wakes up.”
In the heavy gray light he looked terrible, eyes bloodshot, face flat and haggard; if it hadn’t been for the half-decent clothes, Security would have taken him for a junkie. The kid was exhausted. It was heading for three o’clock. Our night shift started in five hours.
“Go ahead,” I said. “Give him a bell.” Richie’s face told me I looked as bad as he did. Every breath I took was still clotted with disinfectant and blood, like the hospital air had closed around me and soaked into my pores. I almost wished I smoked. “And then we can get away from this place. Time to go home.”
9
I dropped Richie outside his place, a beige terraced house in Crumlin—the tattered paintwork said it was rented, the bikes chained to the railings said he was sharing with a couple of mates. “Get some sleep,” I said. “And remember what I said: no booze. We need to be on the ball for tonight. I’ll see you outside HQ at a quarter to seven.” As he put his key in the door, I saw his head drop forward like he had nothing left to hold it up.
Dina hadn’t rung me. I had been trying to take that as a sign that she was peacefully reading or watching telly, or maybe still asleep, but I knew she wouldn’t ring even if she was bouncing off the walls. When Dina’s doing well, she’ll answer texts and the occasional call; when she’s not, she doesn’t trust her mobile enough to touch it. The closer I got to home, the more that silence seemed to turn dense and volatile, an acrid fog I had to fight through to reach my door.
Dina was sitting cross-legged on my living-room floor, with my books strewn around her like a hurricane had flung them off the shelves, ripping a page out of Moby Dick. She stared me in the eye, tossed the page on a pile in front of her, threw the Melville against the opposite wall with a bang, and reached for another book.
“What the fuck—” I dropped my briefcase and grabbed the book out of her hand; she kicked out at my shin, but I leapt back. “What the hell, Dina?”
“You, you fuckety bastarding prick, you locked me, what was I supposed going to do, sit here good girl like your dog? You don’t own you can’t make me!”
She made a dive for another book; I dropped on my knees and caught her wrists. “Dina. Listen to me. Listen. I couldn’t leave you the keys. I don’t have a spare set.”
Dina laughed, a high yelp that bared her teeth. “Yeah yeah yeah right, you don’t, Mr. Anal with your books are alphabetized but no spare keys? You know what I was going to? Put this on fire.” She jerked her chin fiercely at the heap of torn pages in front of her. “Then let’s see if someone doesn’t let me out, smoke alarm going good and loud, all your snobby yuppie neighbors wouldn’t be happy then, would they, ooh darlings the noise, in a residential area—”
She would have done it. The thought made my stomach curl. Maybe it weakened my grip: Dina lunged sideways, nearly ripping her wrists free, going for the books again. I clamped my hands tighter and shoved her back against the wall; she tried to spit at me, but nothing came out. “Dina. Dina. Look at me.”
She fought, twisting and kicking and making a furious humming sound between her clenched teeth, but I hung on till she froze stiff and her eyes met mine, blue and wild as a Siamese cat’s. “Listen to me,” I said, close into her face. “I had to go to work. I thought you’d still be asleep when I got home. I didn’t want to wake you up to let me in. So I took the keys with me. That’s all. That’s all there is to it. OK?”
Dina thought that over. Gradually, fraction by fraction, her wrists relaxed in my hands. “Ever do that again,” she said coolly, “ever. I’ll ring your cops and say you keep keeping me locked here and you rape me every day, every way. See how your job does then. Detective Sergeant.”
“Christ, Dina.”
“I will.”
“I know you will.”
“Oh, don’t give me that look. If you lock me up like I’m some animal, some crazy, then it’s your fault if I have to get out some way. Not my fault. Yours.”
The fight was over. She flicked my hands off like she was batting away midges and started combing her hair into place with her fingertips. “All right,” I said. My heart was hammering. “All right. I’m sorry.”
“Seriously, Mikey. That was a stupid thing to do.”
“Apparently. Yeah.”
“Not apparently. Obviously.” Dina got up off the floor and shoved past me, dusting off her hands and wrinkling her nose in distaste as she picked her way through the scattered books. “God, what a mess.”
I said, “I have work tomorrow, too, and I haven’t had a chance to get spare keys cut. I figured you might want to stay with Geri till I do.”
Dina groaned. “Oh, God, Geri. She’ll tell me about the kids. I mean, I love them and whatever, but, like, Sheila’s periods and Colm’s spots? Way TMI.” She thumped down on the sofa, with a bounce, and started shoving her feet into her biker boots. “I’m not staying here if you seriously have only one set of keys, though. I might go stay with Jezzer. Can I use your phone? I’m out of credit.”
I had no idea who or what Jezzer was, but it didn’t sound like my kind of person. I said, “Sweetheart, I need a favor from you. I really do. I’ve got a lot on my plate right now, and I’d feel much better if I knew you were at Geri’s. I know it’s stupid and I know you’ll be bored out of your twist, but it’d make a big difference to me. Please.”
Dina’s head came up and she stared at me, that unblinking Siamese stare, her shoelace wrapped around her hands. “This case,” she said. “The Broken Harbor one. It’s getting to you.”
Dammit, stupid stupid stupid: the last thing I wanted her thinking about was this case. “Not really,” I said, keeping my voice casual. “It’s more that I’ve got Richie to keep an eye on—my partner, the rookie I told you about? It’s hard work.”
“Why? Is he thick?”
I picked myself up off the floor. Somewhere in the struggle I had whacke
d my knee, but letting Dina see that would be a bad idea. “Not thick at all, just new. He’s a good kid, he’s going to make a good detective, but he’s got a lot to learn. It’s my job to teach it to him. Throw in some eighteen-hour shifts, and it’s going to be a long week.”
“Eighteen-hour shifts in Broken Harbor. I think you should swap cases with someone else.”
I extracted myself from the mess, trying not to limp. There had to be a hundred torn-out pages in the heap, presumably each from a different book. I tried not to think about it. “It doesn’t work that way. I’m fine, sweetheart. Really.”
“Hmm.” Dina went back to her lace, tugging it tight with quick sharp jerks. “I worry about you,” she said. “Do you know that?”
“Don’t. If you want to help me out, the best thing you can do is humor me and spend a night or two at Geri’s. OK?”
Dina tied her lace in some kind of fancy double bow and pulled back to examine it. “OK,” she said, on a long-suffering sigh. “You have to give me a lift there, though. Buses are too scratchy. And hurry up and get those keys cut.”
* * *
I dropped Dina off at Geri’s and made excuses to avoid going in—Geri wanted me to stay for dinner, on the grounds that “you won’t catch it, sure Colm and Andrea haven’t, I thought Colm’s bowels were at him earlier on but he says he’s grand—Pookie, down!—I don’t know what he was doing in the toilet all that time, but that’s his business…” Dina threw me a silent-scream face over her shoulder and mouthed You owe me as Geri shepherded her into the house, still talking, with the dog bouncing and yapping around them.
I went home again, threw a few things into a holdall and grabbed a fast shower and an hour’s sleep. I got dressed like a kid on a first date, all thumbs and heartbeat, dressing just for him: shirt and tie in case I got a chance to interview him, two thick jumpers so I could wait for him through the cold, heavy dark coat to shield me from him till the right moment came. I imagined him, somewhere, dressing for me and thinking about Broken Harbor. I wondered if he still thought he was the stalker, or if he understood that he had turned to prey.
Richie was outside the back gate of Dublin Castle at a quarter to seven, carrying a sports bag and wearing a padded jacket, a woolly hat and, going by his shape, every fleece he owned. I rode the speed limit all the way to Broken Harbor, as the fields dimmed around us and the air turned sweet with turf smoke and plowed earth. It was getting dark when we parked in Ocean View Parade—across the estate from the Spains’, nothing but scaffolding, no one to spot an unfamiliar car—and started walking.
I had memorized the route from a map of the estate, but I still felt like we were lost the moment we stepped away from the car. Dusk was closing in: the day’s clouds had blown away and the sky was a deep blue-green, with a faint white glow over the rooftops where the moon was rising, but the streets were dark, chunks of garden wall and unlit street lamps and sagging chicken wire looming out of nowhere and gone a few steps later. When our shadows showed faintly they were twisted and unfamiliar, turned hunchbacked by the holdalls slung over our shoulders. Our footsteps came back to us like followers’, bouncing off bare walls and across stretches of churned mud. We didn’t talk: the dusk that was helping to cover us could be covering someone else, anywhere.
In the near-darkness the sound of the sea was bigger, stronger, disorienting, rising up at us from every direction at once. The patrol floaters’ old dark-blue Peugeot materialized behind us like a ghost car, so close that we both jumped, its engine noise hidden in that long dull roar. By the time we realized who it was, they were gone, slipping away between houses that showed stars through their window-holes.
Down Ocean View Rise, rectangles of light fell across the road. One of them lit up a yellow Fiat parked outside the Spains’ house: our fake Fiona was in place. At the top of Ocean View Walk, I moved Richie into the shadow of the corner house, put my mouth close to his ear and whispered, “Goggles.”
He squatted over his holdall and pulled out a pair of thermal-imaging goggles. Supplies had given him the good ones, newbie or no. The stars vanished and the dark street leaped into ghostly half life, creepers hanging pale on tall blocks of gray wall, wild plants crisscrossing white and lacy where the pavements should have been. In a couple of the gardens, small glowing shapes crouched in corners or scurried through the weeds, and three phantom wood doves slept high in a tree, heads tucked under their wings; no warm thing bigger than that, anywhere in sight. The street was silent, just sea-sounds and wind fingering through the creepers and a lone bird crying out on the beach, over the wall. “Looks clear,” I said, into Richie’s ear. “Let’s go. Carefully.”
The goggles said nothing was alive in our man’s lair, at least not in the corners I could see. The scaffolding was rough with rust, and I felt it shake under our weight. Upstairs, the moon blazed in through a window-hole where the plastic was pinned back like a curtain. The room had been stripped bare; the Bureau had taken everything, to test for prints, fibers, hairs, body fluids. There were black swipes of print dust on the walls and the windowsills.
Every light in the Spains’ house was on, turning the place into a great beacon signaling to our man. Our fake Fiona was in the kitchen, still wrapped in her red duffle coat; she had filled the Spains’ kettle and was leaning against the counter waiting for it to boil, cupping her mug in both hands and staring blankly at the finger paintings stuck to the fridge. In the garden, moonlight caught on glossy leaves, turned them white and shivering so that it looked like all the trees and hedges had burst into flower at once.
We set up our stuff where our man had set up his: against the back wall of the hide, for clear views of both the Spains’ kitchen—just in case—and the front window-hole, looking out over the beach, that he had used as a door. The plastic sheeting over the other holes would screen us from a watcher hidden in the jungle all around. The night was coming down cold, there would be frost before dawn; I spread out my sleeping bag to sit on, added another jumper under my coat. Richie knelt on the floor pulling stuff out of his holdall like a kid on a camping trip: a thermos, a packet of chocolate Hobnobs, a slightly squashed tower of sandwiches wrapped in tinfoil. “Starving,” he said. “Sandwich, yeah? I brought enough for the two of us, in case you didn’t get a chance.”
I was about to say no automatically when I realized that he was right, I hadn’t remembered to bring food—Dina—and that I was starving too. “Thanks,” I said. “I’d love one.”
Richie nodded and pushed the sandwich tower towards me. “Cheese and tomato, turkey, or ham. Take a few.”
I took cheese and tomato. Richie poured strong tea into the thermos cap and tilted it at me; when I held up my water bottle, he downed the tea in one and poured himself another capful. Then he made himself comfortable with his back against the wall and got stuck into his sandwich.
He didn’t look like he was under the impression that tonight would involve deep and meaningful conversation, which was good. I know other detectives get into heart-to-hearts on stakeouts. I don’t. One or two newbies had tried, either because they genuinely liked me or because they wanted to nuzzle up to the boss, I didn’t bother to find out which before I nipped that in the bud. “These are good,” I said, taking another sandwich. “Thanks.”
Before it got dark enough for action stations, I checked in with the floaters. Our fake Fiona’s voice was steady, maybe too steady, but she said she was fine, thanks, no backup needed. Marlboro Man and his friend said we were the most exciting thing they’d seen all evening.
Richie was working his way methodically through the sandwiches, gazing out past the last row of houses to the dark beach. The comforting fragrance of his tea made the room feel warmer. After a while he said, “I wonder did it actually use to be a harbor.”
“It did,” I said. He would take it for granted that I had been researching, Mr. Boring using his scraps of free time to comb the internet. “This was a fishing village, a long time back. You might still be able t
o see what’s left of the pier, down at the south end of the beach, if you go looking.”
“Is that why Broken Harbor, yeah? The broken-down pier?”
“No. It’s from breacadh: daybreak. I suppose because it would have been a good place to watch the dawn.”
Richie nodded. He said, “I’d say it was lovely out here, back before all this.”
“It probably was,” I said. The smell of the sea swept over the wall and in through the empty window-hole, wide and wild with a million intoxicating secrets. I don’t trust that smell. It hooks us somewhere deeper than reason or civilization, in the fragments of our cells that rocked in oceans before we had minds, and it pulls till we follow mindlessly as rutting animals. When I was a teenager, that smell used to set me boiling, spark my muscles like electricity, bounce me off the walls of the caravan till my parents sprang me free to obey the call, bounding after whatever tantalizing once-in-a-lifetimes it promised. Now I know better. That smell is bad medicine. It lures us to leap off high cliffs, fling ourselves on towering waves, leave behind everyone we love and face into thousands of miles of open water for the sake of what might be on the far shore. It had been in our man’s nose, two nights before, when he climbed down the scaffolding and went over the Spains’ wall.
Richie said, “They’ll say it’s haunted now. Kids.”
“Probably.”
“Be daring each other to run up and touch the door of the house. Go inside.”
Below us, the lampshades Jenny had bought for her cozy family kitchen were bright with yellow butterflies. One of them was missing, gone to Larry’s lab. “You’re talking like it’s going to be abandoned for good,” I said. “Dial down the negativity there, old son. Jenny’ll need to sell up, once she’s able. Wish her luck. She could do with it.”
Richie said bluntly, “A few more months and the whole estate’ll be abandoned. It’s dead in the water. No one’s gonna buy out here, and even if they were, there’s hundreds of houses to choose from. Are you telling me you’d pick that one?” He jerked his chin towards the window.