Gaffney sits up even straighter. ‘I can, of course.’
‘Anyone who can’t?’ No one moves. ‘Good. We need someone to pull Aislinn’s financials – Gaffney, start on that; you’ll need to go through them anyway, for her evening-class payments.’
Breslin sighs, just loud enough to make it clear that I’m wasting valuable time and resources. Steve says, to everyone, ‘We don’t have a motive yet. The romance gone bad is the obvious one, but we can’t rule out a financial angle. Rory mentioned that his bookshop’s been having a hard time; and Aislinn’s mate Lucy Riordan said she had a bit of cash stashed away. Rory could have asked her to put a few grand into the bookshop and got nasty when she turned him down, something like that.’
Breslin shrugs. He’s started doodling on the corner of his notebook.
‘We’ll need Rory’s financials, too,’ I say. ‘Gaffney, pull those while you’re at it. Someone needs to get onto the phone company and start them tracking where Fallon’s phone went last night: Deasy, got a decent contact at Vodafone? Someone to confirm Lucy Riordan’s alibi with the rest of the staff at the Torch Theatre: Stanton, you handle that. Someone to talk to the staff at the Market Bar and Pestle, see if they can tell us anything about Aislinn and Rory’s dates: Meehan, yeah? Someone to assign one of the uniforms from the scene to go to the autopsy: Deasy, you do that. It’ll be early tomorrow morning; make sure he’s not late, or Cooper will throw a shit fit.’ Snorts from everyone who’s met Cooper. ‘Me and Moran will follow up with the techs, make sure we’re kept updated. There’ll be more, but those should get us started. Any questions?’
Head-shakes. They’re fidgeting at the starting line.
‘OK,’ I say. ‘Let’s go.’Meehan claps the book of jobs shut. They swing to their desks, their phones, to Rory’s statement, diving to see who can hit the ground running fastest. Incident Room C leaps with the energy ricocheting off the shining rows of desks, splintering on the windows.
And underneath all that, hidden and working away, the small ferocious buzzing of the thing at the back of my mind and Steve’s, nudging for us to let it loose. Breslin’s slick fair head is bent over his notebook, but when he feels me looking he glances up and gives me a great big smile.
Steve types up our report for the gaffer while I go through the stuff the floaters brought back. They’re all competent enough, although Deasy can’t spell and Gaffney feels the need to share every detail of everything, relevant or not (‘Witness advised that she was taking her daughter Ava aged eight to visit her grandfather in St James’s Hospital after severe stroke and saw Murray getting out of car . . .’). Nothing particularly interesting in the door-to-door: Aislinn was friendly with her neighbours – no bad blood over noise or parking spaces, nothing like that – but not close to any of them; a few of them saw a woman matching Lucy’s description going into or out of her house now and then; none of them ever saw any other visitors. Aislinn never mentioned a boyfriend. They saw her going out semi-regularly in the evenings, all dolled up, but they weren’t on gossip-swapping terms and they have no idea where she was heading or what she did there. The old couple in Number 24 are half deaf and heard nothing last night; the young couple in Number 28 heard Aislinn blasting her Beyoncé, but they say she turned the music either down or off a little before eight – they could pinpoint it because eight is the baby’s bedtime, so they appreciated the volume control. After that, not a sound.
The old fella in Number 3 backs Rory’s story, or bits of it: he was heading out to walk his dog (a white male terrier named Harold, according to Gaffney) just before eight o’clock last night, and he saw a guy matching Rory’s description turning in to Viking Gardens. When he got back fifteen minutes later, the guy was still there, down at the bottom of the road, messing about with his phone. None of the other neighbours were outside in those fifteen minutes – Viking Gardens is mostly old people and a few young families, no one heading out on the Saturday-night batter – which means Rory could have been let into the house, killed Aislinn, and been back outside texting up a cover story by ten past eight; but I don’t buy it. The part that turned him twitchy was earlier, before the Tesco side-trip. None of the neighbours were out in the road then, to see him or not.
Steve is still typing. Breslin’s headed off for his chats with Rory’s brothers, taking Gaffney with him and dispensing wisdom all the way; Meehan has buttoned his overcoat to the neck and gone off to time himself wandering around Stoneybatter, Deasy’s having a laugh with his contact at the phone company, Stanton’s laying down the law to someone from the buses. Their voices wander around the high corners of the room, turning blurry at the edges from too much space. The windows are dark.
My phone rings. ‘Conway,’ I say.
O’Kelly says, ‘You and Moran, my office. I want an update.’
‘We’ll be right in,’ I say, and hear him hang up. I look at Steve, who’s slumped in his chair, giving his report a last once-over. ‘The gaffer wants to see us.’
Steve’s head comes up and he blinks at me. Each of those takes a few seconds; he’s two-thirds asleep. For once he looks his age. ‘Why?’
‘He wants an update.’
‘Oh, Jaysus.’ The gaffer wants in-person updates when you’re working a big one, which this isn’t, or when you’re taking too long to get a solve, which even if you’re in his bad books should be longer than one day. This can’t be good.
The rumours say I got this gig because O’Kelly needed to tick the token boxes and I tick two for the price of one – and those are the nice rumours. All of them are bullshit. When the gaffer brought me on board, he was down a D – one of his top guys had just put in his papers early – and I was Missing Persons’ shining star, waving a sheaf of fancy high-profile solves in each hand. I was fresh off a headline-buster where I’d whipped out every kind of detective work in the book, from tracing phone pings and wi-fi logons to coaxing info out of family members and bullying it out of friends, in order to track down a newly dumped dad who had gone on the run with his two little boys, and then I’d spent four hours talking him into coming out of his car with the kids instead of driving the lot of them off a pier. I was hot stuff, back then. Me and the gaffer both had every reason to think this was gonna be great.
O’Kelly knows what’s been going down, I know he knows, but he’s never said a word; just watched and waited. No gaffer wants this on his squad, wants the sniping in corners and the grey poison smog hanging over the squad room. Any gaffer in the world would be wondering, by now, how he could get rid of me.
Steve hits Print on the report; the printer gets to work with a smug purr, nothing like the half-dead wheeze off the squad-room yoke. We find our combs, sort our hair, brush down our jackets. Steve has something blue smudged on his shirt front, but I don’t have the heart to tell him, in case the effort of trying to clean it off kills him. I assume I’ve got whiteboard marker on my face, or something, and he’s doing the same for me.
One of the reasons I don’t trust O’Kelly is because of his office. It’s full of naff crap – a framed crayon drawing that says world’s best granddad, pissant local golf trophies, a shiny executive toy in case he gets the urge to make clicky noises with swingy balls – and stacks of dusty files that never move. The whole room says he’s some outdated time-server who spends the day practising his golf swing and polishing his nameplate and working out fussy ways to tell if someone’s touched his stash bottle of single malt. If O’Kelly was that, he wouldn’t have been running Murder for coming up on twenty years. The office has to be window dressing, to put people off their guard. And the only people who see it are the squad.
O’Kelly is leaning back in his fancy ergonomic chair, with his arms draped on its arms, like some banana-republic dictator granting an audience. ‘Conway. Moran,’ he says. ‘Tell me about Aislinn Murray.’
Steve holds out the report the way you would wave raw meat at a mean dog. O’Kelly jerks his chin at his desk. ‘Leave that there. I’ll read it later. Now
I want to hear it from you.’
He hasn’t told us to sit – which has to be a good sign: this isn’t going to take all night – so we stay standing. ‘We’re still waiting on the post-mortem,’ I say, ‘but Cooper’s preliminary says someone punched her in the face and she hit the back of her head on the fireplace. She was expecting a guy called Rory Fallon over for dinner. He admits he was on the spot at the relevant time, but he says she didn’t answer her door and he hadn’t a clue she was dead till we told him this afternoon.’
‘Huh,’ O’Kelly says. The hard sideways light from his desk lamp throws heavy shadows across his face, turning him one-eyed and unreadable. ‘Do you believe him?’
I shrug. ‘Half and half. Our main theory is she did answer her door, they had some kind of argument and Fallon threw the punch. He could be telling the truth about not knowing she was dead, though.’
‘Got any hard evidence?’
Less than twelve hours in, and I’m taking shit for not having a DNA match. I dig my hands into my jacket pockets so I won’t slap O’Kelly’s stupid spider plant off his desk.
Steve says, before I can answer, ‘The Bureau have the coat and gloves Fallon says he was wearing last night, and we’re searching his route home in case he ditched anything. He gave consent for us to search his flat and take any other clothes that look interesting, so a couple of the lads are on that. According to the techs, if he’s our guy we’ve got a good chance at blood or epithelials, or a fibre match to what they found on the body.’
‘I’ve asked a mate in the Bureau to put a rush on his stuff,’ I say, keeping my voice level. ‘We should have something preliminary tomorrow. We’ll let you know.’
O’Kelly matches up his fingertips and watches us. He says, ‘Breslin thinks ye need to quit wasting everyone’s time and arrest the little scumbag.’
I say, ‘It’s not Breslin’s case.’
‘Meaning what? You’ve got doubts? Or you just want to show everyone that Breslin’s not the boss of you?’
‘If anyone’s stupid enough to think Breslin’s the boss of us, I’m not gonna waste my time proving they’re wrong.’
‘So it’s doubts.’
In the dark outside the window, the wind is picking up. It sounds like wide country wind, barrelling down long straight miles with nothing to stand in its way, like the squad is standing high in the middle of empty nowhere. I say, ‘We’ll make the arrest when we’re ready.’
O’Kelly says, ‘Doubts about whether you’ve got enough to make it stick? Or about whether the boyfriend’s guilty at all?’
He’s looking at me, not at Steve. I say, ‘Doubts about whether we’re ready to arrest him.’
‘That doesn’t answer my question.’
There’s a silence. O’Kelly’s one eye, metallic in the lamplight, doesn’t blink.
I say, ‘I think he’s probably our guy. There’s no way I’m gonna arrest him based on nothing but my gut feeling. If that’s a problem, take the case off us and give it to Breslin. He’s welcome to it.’
O’Kelly eyeballs me for another minute; I stare back. Then he says, ‘Keep me updated. I want a full report on my desk every evening. Anything big shows up, you don’t save it for the report; you let me know straightaway. Is that clear?’
‘Clear,’ I say. Steve nods.
‘Good,’ O’Kelly says. He spins his chair away from the desk, to one of the stacks of files, and starts flipping paper. Dust swirls up into the light of his desk lamp. ‘Go get some kip. Ye look even worse than this morning.’
Steve and I wait till we’re back in the incident room, with the door shut, before we look at each other. He says, ‘What was that all about?’
I flick my coat off the back of my chair and swing it on. The floaters upped their rhythm when we came in; the room is all clicking keys and rustling paper. ‘That was the gaffer getting all up in our grille. What bit did you miss?’
‘Yeah, but why? He’s never given a damn about any of our cases before, unless we weren’t doing the business and he wanted to give us a bollocking.’
I throw my scarf around my neck and tuck the ends in tight: the dark at the window has a condensed look that says it’s cold out there. O’Kelly’s taken the shine off our bright new idea; gangsters and bent cops feel like a gymnast-level stretch, compared to just more people trying to screw me over. ‘Right. And even after the bollockings, I’m still here. Maybe the gaffer figures he needs to up his game.’
‘Or,’ Steve says, quieter. He hasn’t started packing up yet; he’s standing by his desk, one finger tapping an absent tattoo on the edge. ‘If he’s been wondering the same stuff we’ve been wondering, maybe for a while now, but he doesn’t want to say anything till he’s sure . . .’
I say, ‘I’m going home.’
From the outside, my gaff looks a lot like Aislinn Murray’s: a one-storey Victorian terraced cottage, thick-walled and low-ceilinged. It fits me just about right; when I let someone stay over – which isn’t often – I’m twitchy by morning, starting to feel the two of us barging up against the walls. The 1901 census says back then a couple were raising eight kids in it.
Get inside and my place has fuck-all in common with Aislinn’s. I have the original floorboards – sanded them and polished them myself, when I first bought the gaff – and the original fireplace, none of this gas fire and laminate shite; the walls are scraped back to bare brick – I did that myself, too – and whitewashed. The mortgage and my car payments eat enough of my paycheque that my furniture comes from Oxfam and the low end of Ikea, but at least nothing is gingham.
I throw my satchel on the sofa, turn off the alarm and switch on the coffee machine. I’ve got a text from my mate Lisa: We’re in pub get down here! I text her back Pulled a double shift, gonna crash. This is true enough – I’ve been up for more than twenty-four hours, and my eyes aren’t focusing right – but I could still have done with a pint and a laugh with a bunch of people who don’t think I’m poison. Except that’s the reason I’m staying in. You spend long enough being treated like you’re wearing a shit on me sign, you start to worry that the sign’s developing a reality of its own and now anyone you talk to can see it. In my mates’ heads I’m Antoinette the top cop, smart kickass successful Antoinette, nobody fucks with Antoinette. I want to keep it that way. I’ve turned down a lot of pints, the last few months.
Plus, odds are the gang in the pub includes my mate with the security firm. I don’t want him offering me the job again. I’m not gonna take it – not tonight, anyway, not with that dare still flashing at me – but I’m not ready for him to take it off the table.
I should throw some dinner into me and crash out, but I hate wasting time on sleep even worse than I hate wasting it on food. I stick some pasta ready-meal thing in the microwave; while it heats up, I ring my ma, which I do every night, I’m not sure why. My ma isn’t the type to bitch about her back problems or update me on which of her friends’ kids are up the pole and what she found while she was emptying some middle manager’s bin, which doesn’t leave her a lot to talk about. Me, when I’m in a good mood, I tell her the basic outline of my day. When I’m not, I give her the details: what the wounds looked like, what the parents said while they sobbed. Sometimes I catch myself at the scene filing away the bad stuff, thinking this is gonna be the one that finally gets to her, gets even just a sharp breath or a snap at me to leave it. So far nothing ever has.
‘Howya,’ my ma says. Click of a lighter. She has a smoke while we talk; when she puts it out, we hang up.
I hit the button for an espresso. ‘Howya.’
‘Any news?’
‘Me and Moran pulled a street fight. Couple of drunk fellas jumped another one, danced on his head. His eyeball was out on the footpath.’
‘Huh,’ my ma says, and inhales. ‘Anything else strange?’
I don’t feel like talking about Aislinn. Too much shite swirling around it, too much stuff I don’t have a handle on; I don’t tell my ma about anything I
haven’t got well sussed. ‘Nah. Lisa texted me to go for a pint with the lads, but I’m shattered. Gonna crash.’
My ma lets that lie for a beat, just long enough to let me know I’m not getting away with it, before she says, ‘Marie Lane said you’re in the newspaper.’
Of course she bleeding did. ‘Did she, yeah?’
‘Not about any street fight. About some young one that got killed in her own house. The paper made you out to be a right gobshite.’
I swap out the coffee pod and hit the espresso button again: I’m gonna need a double. ‘It’s just a bog-standard murder. It made the paper because your woman was a blonde who wore a shit-ton of makeup. The journalist doesn’t like me. End of story.’
A lot of people’s mas would get a taste of the weakness, burrow in and suck out every last drop. Not mine. My ma just wanted to make it clear who’s the boss of this conversation, and who needs to up her game if she wants to bullshit a pro. Now that she’s made her point, she drops it. ‘Lenny asked me again can he move in.’
Lenny and my ma have been together nine years, off and on. He’s all right. ‘And?’
She lets out a hoarse laugh and a blow of smoke together. ‘And I told him he must be joking. If I wanted his smelly jocks in my room, they’d be there by now. He’s talking bollix anyway; he no more wants to eat my cooking, rather get his dinners down the chipper . . .’
She makes me laugh about Lenny till she’s finished her smoke and we hang up. The microwave beeps. I take the pasta thing and my coffee to the sofa and open my laptop.
I hit the dating sites. Over my own dead body would I do this at work – one glance over my shoulder, or one trawl through my computer when I’m out of the squad room, and I can already hear the whoops: Jaysus, lads, Conway’s doing the internet dating! – Yeah, frigidbitches.com – There’s a market for everything these days – For her? You serious? – Hey, we all know she gives a good gobble or she wouldn’t be here, she can put that on her profile . . . But if Mr Loverman exists, Aislinn met him somehow. Checking out her work colleagues and her evening classes won’t cover the crim angle, and going by her phone and by Lucy, she didn’t have much of a social life. Unless she found herself a gangster who was learning to crochet, the internet is my best bet.