“I don’t believe in ghosts,” I said. “And neither do you, not while you’re on the job, anyway.” I didn’t tell him: the ghosts I believe in weren’t trapped in the Spains’ bloodstains. They thronged the whole estate, whirling like great moths in and out of the empty doorways and over the expanses of cracked earth, battering against the sparse lighted windows, mouths stretched wide in silent howls: all the people who should have lived here. The young men who had dreamed of carrying their wives over these thresholds, the babies who should have been brought home from the hospital to soft nurseries in these rooms, the teenagers who should have had their first kisses leaning against lampposts that would never be lit. Over time, the ghosts of things that happened start to turn distant; once they’ve cut you a couple of million times, their edges blunt on your scar tissue, they wear thin. The ones that slice like razors forever are the ghosts of things that never got the chance to happen.
Richie had demolished half the sandwiches and was rolling a piece of tinfoil into a ball between his palms. He said, “Can I ask something?”
He practically raised his hand. It made me feel like I was sprouting gray hair and bifocals all over. I said, hearing the stuffy note in my voice, “You don’t need to ask my permission, Richie. That’s part of my job, answering any questions you’ve got.”
“Right,” Richie said. “Then I was wondering how come we’re here.”
“On this earth?”
He didn’t know whether he was supposed to laugh. “No, I mean… Like, here. Doing the stakeout.”
“You’d rather be at home in bed?”
“No! I’m grand where I am; nowhere I’d rather be. I only wondered. Just… it doesn’t make any difference who’s here, does it? If our fella shows, he shows; anyone can bring him in. I would’ve expected you to… I don’t know. Delegate.”
I said, “It probably won’t make any difference to the arrest, no. But it might make a difference to what comes next. If you’re the one who puts the cuffs on your guy, it gets the relationship off on the right foot: shows him who’s his daddy now, straight from the off. In an ideal world, I’d always be the one who made the collar.”
“You’re not, but. Not every time.”
“I’m not magic, my friend. I can’t be everywhere. Sometimes I have to give someone else a chance.”
Richie said, “Not this time, but. No one else’s getting a look-in on this one till we both get tired enough that we fall over. Amn’t I right?”
The grin in his voice felt good, the solid taking it for granted that we were in this together. “Right,” I said. “And I’ve got enough caffeine tabs to last us a while.”
“Is it because it’s kids?”
The grin had faded. “No,” I said. “If it were just the kids, then it’d be no big deal to let some floater take our guy down. But I want to be the one who gets the man who killed Pat Spain.”
Richie waited, watching me. When I left it there, he said, “How come?”
Maybe it was my cracking knees and the stiffness in my neck as I had pulled myself up the scaffolding, the dragging sense that I was moving towards old and tired; maybe that was what made me all of a sudden want to know what the other lads talk about, into the long tedious nights, that brings them into the squad room the next day walking in step, making shared decisions with just a tilt of the head or a lift of an eyebrow. Maybe it was those moments, over the past couple of days, when I had caught myself feeling like I wasn’t just showing a rookie the ropes; when it had felt like Richie and I were working together, side by side. Maybe it was that treacherous sea smell, eroding all my why-nots to shifting sand. Maybe it was just fatigue. “Tell me this,” I said. “What do you think would have happened if our guy had been just a little better at what he did? Cleaned up this place before he went hunting, got rid of his footprints, left the weapons on the scene?”
“We’d have stuck with Pat Spain.”
In the darkness I could barely see him, just the angle of his head against the window, the tilt of his chin towards me. “Yeah. Probably we would have. And even if we’d had a hunch that someone else was involved… What do you think other people would have thought, if we couldn’t put out a description, couldn’t come up with one piece of evidence that he even existed? That Gogan woman, the whole of Brianstown, the man on the street watching this case on the news. Pat and Jenny’s families. What would they have assumed?”
Richie said, “Pat.”
“Exactly like we did.”
“And the real guy would’ve still been out there. Maybe getting ready to do it again.”
“Maybe, yeah. But that’s not my point. Even if he went home last night and found a nice place to hang himself, this guy would have made Pat Spain into a murderer. In the eyes of everyone who’ll ever hear his name, Pat would have been a man who killed the woman who lay down with him. The children they made together.” Even saying the words set that high hum moving in my skull: evil.
Richie said, almost gently, “He’s dead. It couldn’t hurt him.”
“Yeah, he’s dead. Twenty-nine years of life are all he’ll ever have. He should have had fifty more, sixty, but this guy decided to take them all away. And even that wasn’t enough for him: he wanted to go back in time and take away those pathetic twenty-nine years, too. Take away everything Pat had ever been. Leave him with nothing.” I saw that evil like a low cloud of sticky black dust spreading slowly out from this room to cover the houses, the fields, blotting out the moonlight. “That’s fucked up,” I said. “That’s so fucked up I don’t even have words for it.”
We sat there, not talking, while our Fiona found the dustpan and swept up shards of a plate that had smashed in a corner of the kitchen floor. After a while Richie opened his Hobnobs, offered me one and, when I shook my head, munched his way steadily through half the packet. After a while he said, “Can I ask something?”
“Seriously, Richie, you’re going to have to knock that off. It’s not going to inspire confidence in our man if you put up your hand in the middle of an interrogation and ask me if you’re allowed to talk now.”
This time he did grin. “Something personal, but.”
I don’t answer personal questions, not from trainees, but then the whole conversation was one I don’t have with trainees. It took me by surprise, how good it felt, and how easy: to let go of veteran and rookie and all the boundaries that come with them, slip into being just one of two men talking. “Fire away,” I said. “If you’re over the line, I’ll tell you.”
“What does your da do?”
“He’s retired. He was a traffic warden.”
Richie let out a snort of laughter. I said, “What’s funny there?”
“Nothing. Just… I figured something a bit more posh. A teacher at a private school, like; geography, maybe. Now that you say it, though, it makes sense.”
“Should I take that as a compliment?”
Richie didn’t answer. He shoved another Hobnob in his mouth and rubbed crumbs off his fingers, but I could feel him thinking. After a while he said, “What you said at the scene the other day: how you don’t get killed unless you go looking for it. Bad things mostly happen to bad people. That’s a luxury, thinking that. D’you know what I mean?”
I pushed away the nudge of something more painful than irritation. “Can’t say I do, old son. In my experience—and I don’t want to rub this in your face, but I’ve had more of that than you have—what you get out of life is mostly what you planted. Not always, no, but mostly. If you think you’re a success, you will be a success; if you think you deserve nothing but crap, you’ll get nothing but crap. Your inner reality shapes your outer one, every day of your life. Do you follow me?”
Richie watched the warm yellow lights of the kitchen below us. He said, “I don’t know what my dad does; he wasn’t around.” He said it matter-
of-factly, like it was something he had had to say too many times before. “I grew up in the flats—probably you knew that already. I saw loa
ds of bad stuff happen to people who never asked for it. Loads.”
I said, “And here you are. A detective on a top squad, doing the job you always wanted, working the biggest case of the year and damn close to a solve. Wherever you come from, that counts as success. I think you’re proving my point here.”
Richie didn’t turn his head. “I’d say Pat Spain thought the same way as you.”
“Maybe he did. So?”
“So he still lost his job. Worked his arse off, thought positive, did everything right, ended up on the dole. How did he plant that?”
“That was unfair as all hell, and I’ll be the first to say it shouldn’t have happened. But come on: there’s a recession on. Exceptional circumstances.”
Richie shook his head. “Sometimes bad things just happen,” he said.
The sky was rich with stars; it had been years since I had seen so many. Behind us, the sound of the sea and the sound of wind sweeping the long grass fused into one long soothing caress down the back of the night. I said, “You can’t think that way. Whether it’s true or not. You have to believe that somewhere along the way, somehow, most people get what they deserve.”
“Or… ?”
“Or how do you get up in the morning? Believing in cause and effect isn’t a luxury. It’s an essential, like calcium, or iron: you can go without it for a while, but in the end you’ll start eating yourself up from inside. You’re right: every now and then, life isn’t fair. That’s where we come in. That’s what we’re for. We get in there and we fix it.”
Below us, the light went on in Emma’s room—our Fiona, keeping things interesting. It turned the curtains a soft translucent pink, lit the silhouettes of little animals prancing across the cloth. Richie nodded down at the window. He said, “We’re not going to fix that.”
That morning in the morgue filled up his voice. “No,” I said. “That can’t be fixed. But at least we can make sure that the right people pay and the right people get a chance to move on. At least we can manage that much. I know we’re not saving the world. But we’re making it better.”
“You believe that?”
His upturned face, white and young in the moonlight: he so badly wanted me to be right. “Yeah,” I said. “I do. Maybe I’m naïve—I’ve been accused of that before, a couple of times—but I believe it. You’ll see what I mean. Wait till we get this guy. Wait till you go home that night and get into bed, knowing he’s behind bars and he’s going to stay there for three life sentences. See if the world you’re in then doesn’t feel like a better place than this one.”
Our Fiona opened Emma’s curtains and gazed out into the garden, a slight dark silhouette against the pink wallpaper. Richie watched her. He said, “I hope.”
The frail web of lights stretched across the estate had started to disintegrate, the bright threads of inhabited streets snapping into blackness. Richie rubbed his gloved hands together, blew into them. Our Fiona moved back and forth through the empty rooms, turning lights on and off, opening and closing curtains. The cold settled into the concrete of the hide, struck through the back of my coat into my spine.
The night went on and on. A handful of times, a noise—a long slither through the undergrowth below us, a burst of scrabbling and scuffling in the house across the road, a shrill wild squeal—had us on our feet and pressed back against walls, ready for action, before our minds understood that we had heard anything. Once the thermal goggles picked out a fox, luminous and poised in the road, head up, something small drooping from its mouth; another time they caught a sinuous streak of light whipping away through the gardens, between bricks and weeds. A few times we were too slow, caught nothing except the last rattle of pebbles, creepers swaying together, a vanishing flicker of white. Each time, it took longer before our heart rates eased to normal and we could sit down again. It was getting late. Our man was close by, tugged two ways and concentrating hard, deciding.
“I forgot,” Richie said suddenly, after one o’clock. “I brought these.” He leaned over to his sports bag and pulled out a set of binoculars in a black plastic case.
“Binoculars?” I held out my hand for them, opened the case to have a look. They looked low-end, and they weren’t from Supplies; the case still had that new-plastic smell. “Did you go out and buy those specially?”
“They’re the same model our fella had,” Richie said, a touch sheepishly. “I figured we should have them too. See what he saw, yeah?”
“Oh, Jesus. Tell me you’re not one of these touchy-feely types who get all into the idea of seeing through the killer’s eyes while they have a good rub of their intuition.”
“No, I’m bleeding not. I meant literally. Like could he make out facial expressions, could he see anything on the computer—the names of the websites they were on, or whatever. That kind of thing.”
Even in the moonlight I could see his fierce blush. It touched me: not just the idea of him spending his own money and time to track down the right binoculars, but how openly he cared what I thought. I said more gently, holding them out, “It’s a good idea. Have a look; you never know what might turn up.”
He looked like he wished the binoculars would disappear, but he adjusted them and leaned his elbows on the windowsill to focus on the Spains’ house. Our Fiona was at the sink, rinsing her mug. I said, “What are you getting?”
“I can see Janine’s face, really clearly; like if I could lip-read, I could see anything she said. I couldn’t see the screen on the computer, if it was there—wrong angle—but I can read the titles on the bookshelf, and that little whiteboard with the shopping list: eggs, tea, shower gel. That could be something, yeah? If he could read Jenny’s shopping list every night, then he’d know where she was gonna be the next day…”
“It’s worth checking out. We’ll pay special attention to CCTV from her shopping route, see if anyone keeps cropping up.” At the sink, our Fiona’s head flicked round sharply, like she felt our eyes on her. Even without the binoculars, I saw her shiver.
“Man,” Richie said suddenly, loud enough that I jumped. “Shit; sorry. But look at this.”
He passed me the binoculars. I trained them on the kitchen and adjusted them for my eyesight, which was a depressing notch worse than Richie’s. “What am I looking at?”
“Not the kitchen. Past there, down the hall. You can see the front door.”
“So?”
“So,” Richie said, “just left of the front door.”
I shifted the binoculars to the left and there it was: the alarm panel. I whistled, low. I couldn’t see the numbers, but I didn’t need to: watching someone’s fingers move would have told me everything I needed to know. Jenny Spain could have changed the code every day, if she wanted to, and just a few minutes up here while she or Patrick locked up would have undone all her caution. “Well well well,” I said. “Richie, my friend, I apologize for slagging your binoculars. I guess we know how someone could have got past the alarm system. Good work. Even if our man doesn’t show up, tonight hasn’t been a waste of time.”
Richie ducked his head and rubbed at his nose, looking somewhere between embarrassed and pleased. “We still don’t know how he got the keys, sure. Alarm code’s no good without those.”
That was when my phone vibrated, in my coat pocket: Marlboro Man. “Kennedy,” I said.
His voice was a shade above a whisper. “Sir, we’ve got something. We spotted a guy coming out of Ocean View Lane. It’s a cul-de-sac, backs onto the north wall of the estate, nothing but building sites; the only reason for anyone to be there is if he came in over the wall. On the tall side, dark clothing, but we didn’t want to get too close, so that’s all we’ve got. We tailed him at a distance until he turned down Ocean View Lawns. Again, that’s a cul-de-sac, none of the houses are finished, there’s no legit reason why anyone would want to go there. We didn’t want to follow him down there, obviously, but we’re maintaining surveillance on the end of Ocean View Lawns. So far, no sign of anyone coming out, but he c
ould have gone over a wall again. We were going to do a circuit and see if we can pick him up.”
Richie had turned around and was watching me, binoculars hanging forgotten in his hands. I said, “Good catch, Detective. Yes, stay on the line and do a quick tour of the area. If you can get a proper look at the man and give us a description, that’d be great, but for Jesus’ sake don’t risk scaring him off. If you spot anyone, don’t slow down, don’t make it obvious that you’re checking him out, just keep driving and chat away between yourselves and pick up what you can. Go.”
I couldn’t put the phone on speaker, not with our man loose and anywhere, everywhere, every stirring amongst the creepers. I pointed to it and motioned to Richie to come closer. He squatted beside me, ear cocked close.
Murmurs from the floaters, one of them rustling a map and working out directions, the other one easing the car into gear; the low purr of the engine. Someone was drumming his fingertips on the dash. Then, a minute later, a sudden burst of loud, confused gabble—“And the wife says to me, go on, you can keep it in the bin with the rest!”—and an explosion of artificial laughter.
Richie and I, heads almost touching over the phone, weren’t breathing. The gabble rose, died away. After a pause that felt like a week, Marlboro Man said, even more softly but with a rising current of excitement pulling at his voice, “Sir. We’ve just passed a male, about five foot ten or eleven, slim build, heading east on Ocean View Avenue—that’s just over the wall from Ocean View Lawns. There’s no street lighting, so we didn’t get a great look, but he’s wearing a dark mid-length coat, dark jeans, dark wool hat. Going by the walk, I’d say twenties to thirties.”
I heard Richie’s quick hiss of breath. I asked, just as quietly, “Did he suss you?”
“No, sir. I mean, I can’t swear to it, but I honestly don’t think so. He looked round fast when he heard us behind him, and then he put his head right down, but he didn’t do a legger, and as long as we had him in the rearview he was still just walking along the street, same pace, same direction.”