I said, “Why do you think I’ve been giving him those openings?”
Richie shrugged, a complicated, embarrassed squirm. “I dunno.”
“You thought I was being sloppy, and I just got lucky that this guy didn’t take advantage. Wrong, old son. I told you before we went in there: our man Conor thinks he has some connection to the Spains. We needed to know what kind of connection. Did Pat Spain cut him off on the motorway and now he thinks all his troubles are Pat’s fault and his luck won’t turn till Pat’s dead and gone, or did he chat to Jenny at some party and decide the stars wanted them to be together?”
Conor hadn’t moved. The white strip-lighting caught the sheen of sweat on his face; it turned him waxy and alien, something shipwrecked from another planet, light-years more lost than we could imagine.
I said, “And we got our answer: in his own fucked way, Conor Whatever cares about the Spains. All four of them. He didn’t point us at Pat because, even to save himself, he wouldn’t drop Pat in the shit. He believes he loved them. And that’s how we’re going to take him down.”
* * *
We left him there for an hour. Richie took the cup down to the evidence room and picked up faded coffee on his way back—the canteen coffee works mainly by the power of suggestion, but it’s better than nothing. I checked in with the patrol floaters: they were working their way out from the estate, they had spotted about a dozen parked cars, all of which came back with legit reasons for being in the area, and they were starting to sound tired. I told them to keep looking. Then Richie and I stayed in the observation room, with our sleeves pushed up and the door wide open, and we watched our man.
It was almost five o’clock. Down the corridor the two lads on night duty were tossing a basketball back and forth and slagging each other’s aim, to keep themselves awake. Conor sat still in his chair, hands cupping his knees. For a while his lips moved, like he was reciting something under his breath, in a regular, steadying rhythm. “Praying?” Richie asked softly, beside me.
“We’ll hope not. If God’s telling him to keep his mouth shut, we’re in for a rough ride.”
In the squad room the ball knocked something off a desk with a crash, one of the lads said something creative and the other one started to laugh. Conor sighed, a deep wave of breath that lifted and dropped his whole body. He had stopped whispering; he looked like he was slipping into some kind of trance. I said, “Let’s go.”
We went in loud and cheerful, fanning ourselves with statement sheets and bitching about the heat, handing him a cup of lukewarm coffee and warning him that it tasted like piss: bygones are bygones, all friends again now. We rewound to the safe ground before we’d lost him, spent a while poking around the edges of stuff we’d already covered—did you ever see Pat and Jenny arguing, ever see either of them shouting, ever see either of them smack the kids… The chance to talk about the Spains lured Conor out of his silent zone, but as far as he was concerned, they had made the Brady Bunch look like something off Jerry Springer. When we moved on to his schedule—what time do you usually get to Brianstown, what time do you fall asleep—his memory went glitchy again. He was starting to feel safe, starting to think he knew how this worked. It was time to move things forward.
I said, “When was the last time you can confirm that you were in Ocean View?”
“Don’t remember. Could be last—”
“Whoa,” I said, sitting up fast and raising a hand to cut Conor off. “Hang on.”
I went for my BlackBerry, hit a button to make the screen light up, pulled it out of my pocket and whistled. “Hospital,” I said to Richie in a quick undertone, and saw in the corner of my eye Conor’s head snapping up like he had been kicked in the back. “This could be what we’ve been waiting for. Suspend the interview till I get back.” And, on my way out the door: “Hello, Doctor?”
I kept one eye on my watch and the other on the one-way glass. Five minutes had never lasted so long, but they were lasting even longer for Conor. That taut control had exploded into pieces: he was shifting his arse like the seat was heating up, drumming his feet, biting his cuticles bloody. Richie watched him with interest and said nothing. Finally Conor demanded, “Who was that?”
Richie shrugged. “How would I know?”
“What you’ve been waiting for, he said.”
“We’ve been waiting for a lot of things.”
“Hospital. What hospital?”
Richie rubbed at the back of his neck. “Man,” he said, halfway between amused and embarrassed, “don’t know if you’ve missed this, but we’re working on a case here, yeah? We don’t go around telling people what we’re at.”
Conor forgot Richie existed. He propped his elbows on the table, folded his fingers across his mouth and stared at the door.
I gave him another minute. Then I came in fast, slammed the door and told Richie, “We’re in business.”
He raised his eyebrows. “Yeah? Beautiful.”
I swung a chair around to Conor’s side of the table and sat down, my knees practically touching his. “Conor,” I said, slapping the phone down in front of him. “Tell me who you think that was.”
He shook his head. He was staring at the phone. I could feel his mind speeding, caroming at wild angles like a race car gone out of control.
“Listen carefully, fella: as of now, you do not have time to dick me around. You may not know it yet, but all of a sudden you are in a big, big hurry. So tell me: who do you think that was?”
After a moment Conor said, low, into his fingers, “Hospital.”
“What?”
A breath. He made himself straighten up. “You said. A hospital.”
“That’s better. And why do you think a hospital would be ringing me?”
Another head-shake.
I slapped the table, just hard enough to make him jump. “Did you hear what I just said about dicking me around? Wake up and pay attention. It’s five in the bloody A.M., there’s nothing in my world except the Spain case, and I just got a call from a hospital. Now why the fuck do you think that might be, Conor?”
“One of them. One of them’s in that hospital.”
“That’s right. You fucked up, son. You left one of the Spains alive.”
The muscles in his throat were clenched so tight that his voice came out a hoarse rasp. “Which one?”
“You tell me, fella. Who would you like it to be? Go on. If you had to choose, which one of them would it be?”
He would have answered anything to make me go on. After a moment he said, “Emma.”
I leaned back in my chair and laughed out loud. “That’s adorable. Really, it is. That sweet little girl: you figure maybe she deserved a shot at life? Too late, Conor. The time to think about that was two nights ago. Emma’s in a morgue drawer right now. Her brain’s in a jar.”
“Then who—”
“Were you out at Brianstown night before last?”
He was half out of his chair, clutching the edge of the table, crouched and wild-eyed. “Who—”
“I asked you a question. Night before last. Were you out there, Conor?”
“Yeah. Yeah. I was there. Who—which—”
“Say please, fella.”
“Please.”
“That’s better. The one you missed was Jenny. Jenny’s alive.”
Conor stared at me. His mouth opened wide, but all that came out was a great rush of breath, like he had been punched in the stomach.
“She’s alive and kicking, and that was her doctor on the phone, telling me she’s awake and wants to talk to us. And we all know what she’s going to say, don’t we?”
He barely heard me. He gasped for air, again and again.
I shoved him down into his seat; he went like his knees had turned liquid. “Conor. Listen to me. I told you that you’ve got no time to waste, and I wasn’t joking. In just a couple of minutes, we’re going to head over to the hospital to talk to Jenny Spain. And as soon as that happens, I will never again in my li
fe give a damn about anything you have to say. This is it: your last chance.”
That reached him. He stared, slack-jawed and wild.
I pulled my chair even nearer, leaned in till our heads were almost touching. Richie slid around and sat on the table, close enough that his thigh pressed against Conor’s arm. “Let me explain something to you,” I said, quiet and even, straight into his ear. I could smell him, sweat and a wild tang like split wood. “I happen to believe that basically, deep down, you’re a decent guy. Everyone else you meet from here on in, every single person, is going to believe you’re a sick, sadistic, psychopathic bastard who should be skinned alive and hung out to dry. I may be losing the bit I have, and I may end up regretting this, but I don’t agree. I think you’re a good guy who somehow ended up in a shit situation.”
His eyes were blind, but that got a tiny twitch of his eyebrows: he was hearing me. “Because of that, and because I know nobody else is going to give you a break, I’m willing to make you a deal. You prove me right, tell me what happened, and I’ll tell the prosecutors you helped us out: you did the right thing, because you felt remorse. When it comes time for your sentencing, that’s going to matter. In a courtroom, Conor, remorse equals concurrent sentences. But if you show me that I’m wrong about you, if you keep on dicking me around, that’s what I’m going to tell the prosecutors, and the whole lot of us are going to go for broke. I don’t like being wrong about people, Conor; it pisses me off. We’ll charge you with everything we can think of, and we’ll go for consecutive sentences. Do you know what that means?”
He shook his head: clearing it or saying no, I couldn’t tell which. I get no say in the sentencing and not a lot in the charges, and any judge who would give out concurrent sentences on dead children needs a straitjacket and a punch in the gob, but none of that mattered. “That means three life sentences in a row, Conor, plus a few years on top for the attempted murder and the burglaries and the destruction of property and whatever else we can whip out. We’re talking about sixty years, minimum. How old are you, Conor? What are your odds of seeing a release date that’s sixty years away?”
“Ah, he might see it,” Richie objected, leaning in to examine him critically. “They look after you, in prison: don’t want you getting out early, even if it’s in a coffin. I’ve gotta warn you, man, the company’s gonna be shite—you won’t be let into the general population ’cause you’d last about two days, you’ll be in the secure unit with all the pedos, so the conversation’s gonna be pretty fucked-up—but at least you’ll have loads of time to make friends.”
That twitch of his eyebrows again: that had got through. “Or,” I said, “you could save yourself a lot of hell, right here. With concurrent sentences, do you know how many years we’re talking about? Around fifteen. That’s bugger-all. How old will you be in fifteen years?”
“My maths isn’t great,” Richie said, giving him another interested once-over, “but I’d say maybe forty-four, forty-five? And I don’t have to be Einstein to figure out there’s a massive difference between getting out at forty-five and getting out at ninety.”
“My partner the human calculator is spot on, Conor. Forty-whatever is still young enough to have a career, get married, have half a dozen kids. Have a life. I don’t know if you realize this, old son, but that’s what I’m putting on the table here: your life. But this is a one-time-only offer, and it expires in five minutes. If your life’s worth anything to you, son, anything at all, better start talking.”
Conor’s head fell back, exposing the long line of his throat, the soft spot at its base where the blood beats just below the skin. “My life,” he said, and his lip curled in something that could have been a snarl or a terrible smile. “Do whatever you want to me. I don’t give a damn.”
He planted his fists on the table, set his jaw and stared straight ahead, into the one-way glass.
I had fucked up. Ten years earlier I would have grabbed for him wildly, thinking I’d lost him, and ended up pushing him further away. Now I know, because I’ve fought hard to learn, how to let other things work with me; how to stay still, stay back, and let the job do its job. I eased back in my chair, examined an imaginary spot on my sleeve and left the silence to stretch while that last conversation dissipated out of the air, absorbed into the graffitied particleboard and the scored linoleum, gone. Our interview rooms have seen men and women pushed over the rims of their own minds, heard the thin dull crack of them breaking, watched while they spilled out things that should never be in the world. These rooms can soak up anything, close around it without leaving a trace behind.
When the air had emptied itself of everything but dust I said, very softly, “But you do give a damn about Jenny Spain.”
A muscle flicked, at the corner of Conor’s mouth.
“I know: you didn’t expect me to understand that. You didn’t think anyone would, did you? But I do, Conor. I understand just how much you cared about all four of them.”
That tic again. “Why?” he asked, the words forcing themselves out against his will. “Why do you think that?”
I rested my elbows on the table and leaned in towards him, my clasped hands next to his, like we were two best mates in the pub having a late-night session of I-love-you-man. “Because,” I said gently, “I understand you. Everything about the Spains, everything about that room you set up, everything you’ve said tonight: all of it tells me what they meant to you. There’s no one in the world who means more, is there?”
His head turned towards me. Those gray eyes were clear as still water, all the night’s tension and turmoil drained away. “No,” he said. “No one.”
“You loved them. Didn’t you?”
A nod.
I said, “Let me tell you the biggest secret I’ve ever learned, Conor. All we really need in life is to make the people we love happy. We can do without anything else; you can live in a cardboard box under a bridge, as long as your woman’s face lights up when you get home to that box in the evening. But if you can’t manage to do that…”
Out of the corner of my eye I saw Richie easing backwards, off the table, leaving the two of us in our circle. Conor said, “Pat and Jenny were happy. The happiest people alive.”
“But then that went, and you couldn’t give it back to them. Probably someone or something out there could have made them happy again, but it wasn’t you. I know exactly what it’s like, Conor: loving someone so much that you’d do anything, you’d rip out your own heart and serve it to them with barbecue sauce if that was what it took to make them OK, but it’s not. It wouldn’t do one fucking bit of good. And what do you do when you realize that, Conor? What can you do? What’s left?”
His hands lay spread on the table, palms upturned, empty. He said, so low I barely heard him: “You wait. All you can do.”
“And the longer you wait, the angrier you get. At yourself, at them, at this whole terrible fucked-up mess of a world. Till you can’t think straight any more. Till you barely know what you’re doing.”
His fingers curled inward, fists tightening.
“Conor,” I said: so softly, words falling weightless as feathers through the hot still air. “Jenny’s been through enough hell for a dozen lifetimes. The last thing I want to do is put her through any more. But if you don’t tell me what happened, then I have to go over to that hospital and make her tell me instead. I’ll have to force her to relive every moment of the other night. Do you think she’s strong enough to take that?”
His head swayed, side to side.
“Neither do I. For all I know, it’ll push her mind so far over the edge that she’ll never find her way back, but I don’t have a choice. You do, Conor. You can save her from that, at least. If you love her, now’s your time to show it. Now’s your time to get it right. You’ll never have another chance.”
Conor vanished, somewhere behind that face as angular and immobile as a mask. His mind was going like a race car again, but he had it under control now, working efficiently
and at furious speed. I didn’t breathe. Richie, pressed back against the wall, was still as stone.
Then Conor took a quick breath, ran his hands over his cheeks and turned to look at me. “I broke into their house,” he said, clearly, matter-
of-factly, as if he was telling me where he had parked a car. “I killed them. Or thought I had, anyway. Is that what you were after?”
I heard Richie let his breath out, with a tiny unconscious whimper. The hum in my skull rose, screamed like a whirl of diving wasps, and died.
I waited for the rest, but Conor was waiting too: just watching me, with those swollen red-edged eyes, and waiting. Most confessions begin with It wasn’t like you think and go on forever. Killers fill up the room with words, trying to coat over the razor edges of the truth; they prove to you over and over that it just happened or that he asked for it, that in their place anyone would have done the same. Most of them will keep proving it till your ears bleed, if you let them. Conor was proving nothing. He was done.
I said, “Why?”
He shook his head. “Doesn’t matter.”
“It’s going to matter to the victims’ family. It’s going to matter to the sentencing judge.”
“Not my problem.”
“I’ll need a motive to go in your statement.”
“Make one up. I’ll sign whatever you want.”
Mostly they loosen, after the river’s been crossed. Everything they had went into clinging to their safe bank of lies. Now the current’s ripped them away, buffeted them dizzy and gasping, smashed them down with a tooth-cracking jolt on the far bank, and they think the hard part is over and done with. It leaves them unraveled and boneless; some of them shake uncontrollably, some of them cry, a few can’t stop talking or can’t stop laughing. They haven’t noticed yet that the landscape is different here; that things are transforming around them, familiar faces dissolving, landmarks vanishing into the distance, that nothing will ever be the same again. Conor was different. He was still gathered like a waiting animal, made of concentration. In some way that I couldn’t spot, the battle wasn’t over.