This is what McCann was softening me up for, with his salvaged statement sheet and his heart-of-gold routine. Maybe Breslin has some squad split in the works, him against Roche, and he’s building up his team. Maybe he’s got a hint that the gaffer is putting in his papers – the golden boy would know – and he figures bringing the bad girl into line would boost his chances for the job. Maybe he’s got nothing specific lined up, just figures I’m an easy opportunity and I’ll come in useful somehow, down the line.
I could laugh, if I had the energy. I’m not gonna come in useful to anyone, not on this squad.
Breslin taps his phone pocket. ‘Conway,’ he says, more gently. ‘I didn’t have to share this with you, remember? I could have just pulled Rory in myself and gone at him solo. I’m sharing because I think it’s better for everyone if you and I work together. Better for the case, for the squad, for you – and yeah, better for me.’ He smiles, putting in just the right balance of fatherly warmth and professional respect. ‘Let’s face it, Conway: you and I, we make a good team. We did nice work together on Rory, Sunday afternoon. With this’ – the phone pocket again – ‘we can do a lot better.’
I’m gearing up to tell him where to stick his rescue effort, when I realise it doesn’t matter. I don’t have to worry about Breslin rescuing me, owning me, sinking me, any of that fancy crap; whatever he has in mind for me, I won’t be here for it. He’s right, we’re good together, and all of a sudden I’m free to use that, without going into a tailspin about consequences like Rory bloody Fallon himself. This quitting thing is fun; I wish I’d thought of it months ago.
‘OK,’ I say. ‘Let’s do it. But we don’t bring up that footage till I give the word. I want to save that.’
‘No problem. You call it.’ Breslin grins at me. ‘This is going to be a lot of fun, Conway. When we show Rory this, he’s going to wet his frilly knickers.’
‘It’s better than that,’ I say. Breslin raises a questioning eyebrow. ‘We’ve been looking for a motive, or at least something that could’ve triggered the attack. Right?’
Breslin blows air out of one corner of his mouth. ‘Well. You have. I still don’t actually care why he did it, as long as we can show that he did it.’
‘Rory gets over to Aislinn’s place,’ I say, ‘all amped up for the big night. He’s a bit early, but that’s no big deal; she lets him in, they’re delighted to see each other. And then, somehow, the stalking comes out. Maybe he lets something slip that tells Aislinn he knows Stoneybatter. Or maybe she mentions having seen him around the area, and he doesn’t cover it fast enough.’
It feels good, coming up with a story. I can see why everyone’s so hooked on it. I’ve got the whole scene playing out in front of me like another video clip, but one I can tweak and nudge till everything about it suits me right down to the ground. ‘Either way, Aislinn’s not happy. She’s already been having doubts about how full-on Rory is; she dismissed those, but this takes him over the line into whacko territory. She tells him to leave, and he loses the head.’
Breslin has his lips pursed and he’s nodding away. ‘I like this,’ he says. ‘I like it a lot. Conway, I think you’re onto something here. I knew there was a reason I had faith in you.’
I say, ‘Let’s see what Rory thinks of it.’
Breslin smiles at me, a great big warm smile like I’m the best thing he’s seen in months. ‘Come on,’ he says. ‘Let’s get out of here. This place stinks.’
I could drink the air in the corridor in one swallow, after that snot we’ve been breathing. Breslin shuts the incident-room door behind us with a neat contemptuous slam that says, You won’t be needing this place any more.
Back in the incident room, I ring Rory and ask him, all friendly and casual, if he would mind giving us a hand by coming in for another quick chat. I’m all ready to knock down a bunch of excuses about how he can’t leave the shop and he’s got an appointment and he doesn’t feel well, but he falls over himself agreeing to come in straightaway. He’s just desperate to prove he’s on our side, but I’m so unused to things being easy that it feels unnatural, almost creepy, like the world has slid a notch sideways and won’t click back to reality. I want sleep, a lot of it.
Steve is still out. I catch some autopilot part of me actually hoping he’ll show up before Rory does – I’ll have to start off the interview with Breslin, what with him bringing me that footage, but I can swap Steve in before we get to the final push; we’ll get a confession off Rory, show that ditzy fool Steve that I was right all along, he’ll apologise and we’ll go for a pint and everything will go back to normal— This is when my brain catches up and remembers that things aren’t going back to normal, not ever again. The incident room lurches, light jumping and stuttering, the hum of the computers rising like sirens.
When I beckon Reilly over to my desk, he doesn’t even bother faking an apology, just puts on a blank pig-face and stares over my shoulder, waiting for me to be done. I was all geared up to take his head off, but looking at that face barely hiding a sneer, all I can think of is Steve: Steve, on that old case years back, getting that key piece of info and pinning it to his lapel instead of bringing it home to the lead D. Reilly makes me sick. I don’t want him ripped to pieces any more; all I want is him out of my sight. When I tell him to go back to the floater pool, his face – sneer slapped right off, raw burn of anger and humiliation rising – doesn’t even give me a drop of satisfaction. The other floaters pretend they’re concentrating on work while he gathers up his stuff and leaves, slamming the door on his way out. Breslin lounges at his desk and watches me, eyes hooded, pen between his teeth, all ready to tell me whether I’ve done the right thing or not. I don’t ask.
The footage shows exactly what Breslin said it did: Rory, wandering around Stoneybatter when he shouldn’t have been. I send Meehan to head over there, pull all the December CCTV footage he can get – there won’t be much left – and start watching. Then I pick out the best shots of Rory, with time stamps, and print them off.
The phone on my desk rings: Bernadette, to say Rory Fallon is downstairs. ‘He’s here,’ I say to Breslin.
‘Let’s do it,’ he says, shoving his chair back. ‘See you later, boys. We’ll bring you back a nice scalp.’
The floaters glance up and nod, too quickly, scared I’ll rip the throat out of anyone who makes eye contact. On my monitor, a blurry black-and-white Stoneybatter street moves in jumps – runner frozen in one corner of the screen, teleported to the opposite side in a blink; Alsatian caught in mid-piss, then vanished – till I hit Stop. The computers and the whiteboard and the floaters billow and shrink around the edges like thin fabric underwater, drifting farther away all the time.
Chapter 12
Rory is in even worse shape than he was on Sunday. His hair still has that plastered-down look, his eyes are bloodshot and his skin is a dry, clothy white. He smells of clothes left too long in the washing machine. A smile jerks up on his face when he sees us, but it’s a reflex, jittery and mechanical. We’re gonna have fun getting him chilled out enough to be useful.
We start by taking him to the nice interview room, the one for shaken-up witnesses and victims’ relatives. It’s cute: pastel-yellow paint, chairs that don’t hate you, a kettle and a hotel-style basket of tea bags and itty-bitty sachets of instant coffee. My First Interview Room, we call it. Even through his jitters, Rory feels the difference; he relaxes enough to take off his second-best coat and hang it tidily over the back of his chair. Underneath he has on jeans and a baggy beige jumper that’s twenty quid’s worth of knitted depression.
‘Let’s get through the paperwork first,’ Breslin says, sliding a rights sheet and a pen across the table. Since Chief Jock is the intimidating one, he’s armed with a big file bursting with everything that could come in useful, plus random paper for padding. Cool Girl is on Rory’s side, deep down, so I’ve got nothing but my notebook and my pen. ‘Sorry about this; I know you’ve already done it, but we need a new one of
these every time. You are not obliged to say anything unless you wish to do so, but anything you do say will be taken down in writing and may be given in evidence. Just like last time. Is that all OK?’
Rory signs without reading. ‘Thanks,’ Breslin says, through a yawn and a pec-display stretch. ‘I need real coffee, not that instant rubbish. Rory? Antoinette? What’ll I get you?’
Normally I’d smack down the ‘Antoinette’ crap, but I know what he’s at. ‘Oh God, yeah, real coffee,’ I say. ‘Black, no sugar. And see if you can find a couple of biscuits, would you? I’m starving.’
‘I’ll raid O’Gorman’s stash,’ Breslin says, grinning. ‘He buys the good stuff; no Rich Tea nonsense there. Rory, what’ll you have?’
‘Um, I—’ A baffled blink while Rory tries to chase down the potential implications of hot drinks. ‘Tea would be— No, coffee. With a bit of milk. Please.’
‘Your wish is my command,’ Breslin says, and hauls himself out of his chair with a groan. ‘I could sleep for a week. It’s this bloody weather. One decent bit of sunshine and I’d be a new man.’
‘Have a look through O’Gorman’s desk, while you’re at it,’ I say. ‘See if he’s got a couple of tickets to Barbados in there.’
‘If he does, we’re out of here. Rory, got your passport?’ Rory manages to catch up and find a laugh, a few seconds too late. Breslin throws us both a grin on his way out the door.
I lean back in my chair, stretching out my legs in front of me, and pull out my hair elastic to redo my bun while we wait. ‘Oof,’ I say. ‘Long few days. How’ve you been getting on?’
‘OK. It’s a lot to take in.’ Rory’s on guard. He hasn’t forgotten that I’m the mean cop who didn’t tell him Aislinn was dead. Steve would have had him cosy and chatting in no time.
Steve isn’t the only one who can play nice. ‘It is, all right,’ I say. ‘Do you want me to set you up with Victim Support, find you someone you can talk to? That’s their job, helping people through this kind of thing. They’re good.’
‘No. Thanks.’
‘You sure?’
‘Yes. I’ll be fine. I just . . . what I really need is to know what happened. I need to know that.’
‘Well, yeah,’ I say, with a rueful grin. ‘Don’t we all.’
Rory risks a fast glance at me. ‘Don’t you . . . ? Do you know yet?’
I sigh and give my head a massage, while I have the hair down. ‘To be honest with you, no, we don’t. We’ve followed a load of lines of investigation, and I can’t go into details, but basically none of them are taking us anywhere. That’s why we’re calling back the people who were closest to Aislinn: we’re hoping someone will be able to give us a fresh idea, kick-start things.’
Rory says, still wary, ‘I’d only known her a couple of months.’
‘I know, yeah. But a connection like you and Aislinn had, that counts more than years of sitting next to her in work and chatting about internet kitty pics.’ I get the tone right: no syrup, just direct and clean and matter-of-fact. ‘You understood her. That was obvious, last time we talked. You weren’t just seeing some blonde with a faceful of fancy makeup; you saw straight through all that. You saw who she really was.’
Rory says quietly, ‘That’s what it felt like.’
‘That’s valuable, man. Me, I’m never going to meet Aislinn. I’m relying on people like you to show me who she was. That’s how we’ll figure out what could’ve happened to her.’ I’ve forgotten all about putting my hair back up; too earnest about this conversation, too far into off-duty chat mode. ‘And I’d say you’ve thought about nothing else, the last couple of days. Am I right?’
Rory bites at his lips. After a moment: ‘More or less. Yes.’
‘And the last couple of nights.’
A nod.
‘Hang in there,’ I say gently. ‘I know what it’s like. At first it feels like it’s taken over your whole life, yeah? And you’re never going to get your head above water again?’
The breath and the wariness go out of Rory together. His shoulders fall forward; he pushes his fingers up under his glasses to rub at his eyes. ‘I haven’t slept. I don’t do well with no sleep, but I can’t . . . I’ve just been walking up and down my living room, hours and hours – my legs are killing me. Late last night something happened in the street outside, a man shouting, and I thought I was having a heart attack; I genuinely thought I was going to die, right there leaning against my wall. I haven’t been able to open the shop, I haven’t even been able to go out of my flat, in case I make a fool of myself by fainting if someone slams a car door.’ He gives me a glance that’s meant to be defiant. ‘I suppose you think that’s pathetic.’
I do, but even more, I think it’s gonna be useful. ‘Me?’ I say, startled. ‘Jesus, no. I’ve seen a lot of people go through this. The way you’re feeling, that’s par for the course.’
‘When you rang . . . I was actually relieved, do you know that? Which is obviously ridiculous, but all I could think was that now I don’t have to spend the day . . .’ His voice wavers. He presses his fingertips to his mouth.
‘You’re doing me a favour, too,’ I say, with just the right amount of sympathy in the smile. ‘In this weather, I’m a lot happier in here than out doing door-to-door.’
‘All I can do is think about it. How it might have happened. I’ve come up with dozens of scenarios. That’s why I can’t sleep. When I close my eyes, those are all I can see.’
‘Thank Jaysus,’ I say, heartfelt. And when Rory looks up, eyes widening: ‘That’s what we do, yeah? We come up with theories on how this could have happened, and then we try to match them to the facts. Only this time none of them are matching, and I have to admit, I’ve run out of theories. I’ve been going mental trying to come up with more. If you’ve got any new ones, then for Jaysus’ sake, throw them my way.’
That would give Steve a laugh: me, begging for all the if-then-maybe fantasy crap this guy can dish out. The thought of Steve jabs me up under the ribs hard enough to mess with my breath.
Rory manages a small, tugged-down smile. ‘How long have you got?’
‘Tell you what: start with your best shot. The one that, deep down, you think is actually what happened. If it’s any good . . . Jaysus, I’ll owe you big-time. And if it doesn’t fly, and that fella’s still not back with the coffee, you can throw the next one at me.’
He looks at me like I might be setting him up for some point-and-laugh joke. ‘Seriously?’
‘Of course, seriously,’ I say. ‘I told you: we rang you because we need all the help we can get. Anything you’ve got is better than a load of nothing. Unless you figure it was, like, aliens.’
This time the smile is almost real. ‘No aliens,’ Rory says. ‘I promise.’ I sit up and pull out my notebook, ready to catch the pearls of wisdom. ‘Well. This is the one I keep coming back to. The thing about Aislinn . . .’
Saying her name makes him flinch. He takes off his glasses and polishes them, turning me and the room blurry and soft, easy to talk to. ‘The thing you have to understand about Aislinn,’ he says, ‘is that she was the kind of person who made you daydream. When you were with her, you found yourself coming up with stories.’ His back is straightening already; I’ve got him on home ground. ‘I wondered if it was because she was a daydreamer herself – I could tell she was; it takes one to know one – but it was more than that. It was because she didn’t mind slipping into your daydream. Coming along for the ride. She liked it.’
Which sounds like a load of bollix to me: no one likes being turned into a bit part in someone else’s fantasy. If that reaches my face, Rory can’t see it, not with his glasses off; but he says, like he heard me thinking, ‘She did. Just to give you an idea: when we went for dinner, I said to her that it felt like we’d known each other for years. Aislinn said yes, she felt the same way – she said something like “Maybe we did meet, somewhere along the way. It’s a small country . . .” So I said, “Maybe we played together whe
n we were little. Six, maybe. In a playground, in autumn. Maybe you’d brought your doll along . . .” Aislinn was smiling, and she said she always did bring her doll to the playground, a grubby old thing called Caramel. So I said, “Maybe you put Caramel down on a bench, so she could watch you on the swings, and I was on the swing next to yours. And then another little girl came along and thought Caramel had been abandoned, and picked her up . . .” ’
Remembering the doll’s name would have been adorable in the groom’s speech; in this context, it’s well over the line into creepy. Rory’s smiling faintly, back at the Aislinn in his memory. ‘I told her the whole story. The two of us saw the other little girl taking Caramel away, so we escaped from our families and followed her and her mother onto a bus and all the way into town, running after her down O’Connell Street, into Clery’s – I said a Guard went after us, but we dodged and hid inside a huge umbrella, and we foiled a pickpocket by tripping him up with the point of the umbrella . . . It turned out that the pickpocket had just robbed the little girl’s mother’s wallet, and they were so grateful to us, the little girl didn’t even mind giving Caramel back to Aislinn. And she and her mother brought us home in a horse-drawn carriage.’
Holy Jaysus. By this time I would have been out of the restaurant and halfway home, on the phone to my mate Lisa, breaking my shite laughing and swearing off relationships for life. ‘I see what you mean about the date going great guns,’ I say, smiling away. ‘That must’ve been lovely.’
‘It was. I’m sure it sounds silly, but at the time it felt—’ His chin goes up defiantly. ‘It felt magical. As if the whole thing had actually happened, but somehow we’d both forgotten, and telling the story was bringing it to life again. Aislinn was laughing, adding in bits of her own; she kept saying, “We must have been starving, maybe the man at the doughnut kiosk in O’Connell Street gave us doughnuts,” and “Maybe a dog almost sniffed us out under the umbrella, and we threw a bit of doughnut to make it go away . . .” Like I said: she was happy with me making up stories around her. She encouraged it. She brought it out in people.’