Broken Harbour

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 whacked 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 to 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.

“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 loads 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 could 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.”

“Ocean View Avenue. Is that inhabited?”

“No, sir. Just walls.”

So no one could say we were putting the inhabitants in danger, by letting this thing go free through the night to find its own way to us. Even if Ocean View Avenue had been teeming with rosy families and unlocked doors, I wouldn’t have worried. This wasn’t a spree killer, blazing away at anything that came on his screen. No one mattered to this guy, no one existed, except the Spains.

Richie had moved over to his holdall, crouching low so he wouldn’t be silhouetted against the window-holes, and pulled out a folded piece of paper. He spread it on the floor in front of us, in a pale rectangle of moonlight: a map of the estate.

“Good,” I said. “Get onto Detective…” I clicked my fingers at Richie and pointed down at the Spains’ kitchen; he mouthed Oates. “Detective Oates. Let her know it looks like action stations. Tell her to make sure the doors are locked, the windows are locked and her gun is loaded. Then she needs to start moving stuff-papers, books, DVDs, I don’t care-from the front of the house to the kitchen, as visibly as possible. You two, fall back to the point where you first spotted this guy. If he chickens out and tries to head back past you, pick him up. Don’t ring me again unless it’s urgent. Otherwise, we’ll let you know if anything happens.”

I pocketed my phone. Richie brought a finger down on the map: Ocean View Avenue, up in the northwest corner of the estate. “Here,” he said, very quietly, just a murmur under the powerful murmur of the sea. “If he’s heading for us, and he’s sticking to the empty streets and going over walls for shortcuts, it’ll take him ten, maybe fifteen minutes.”

“Sounds about right. I don’t see him coming straight here: he’s got to be worried that we’ve found this place. He’ll have a nose around first, decide whether he’s going to risk coming up here: look for cops, for unfamiliar cars, see if there’s any activity… Let’s say twenty-five minutes, all told.”

Richie glanced up at me. “If he decides it’s too risky, does a legger, then it’s the floaters who get to pick him up. Not us.”

“Fine with me. Unless he comes up here, he’s just some guy out for a night walk in the middle of nowhere. We can find out who he is and have a nice chat with him, but unless he’s stupid enough to wear the bloody trainers or come out with a full confession, we won’t be able to hold him. And I’m happy to let someone else be the guy who picks him up and has to throw him back a few hours later. We don’t want him feeling like he’s got one up on you and me.” What we would do if he ran didn’t matter: I knew he was coming to us, knew as surely as if I could smell him, a sharp hot musk steaming off the rooftops and rubble, curling closer. Since the moment I had seen that lair, I had known he would come back to it. Sooner or later, an animal on the run runs for home.

Richie’s mind had been moving in the same direction. He said, “He’ll come. He’s already closer than he ever got last night; he’s dying to find out what’s the story. Once he sees Janine…”

I said, “That’s why we’ve got her moving stuff to the kitchen. I’m betting the first thing he’ll do is check out the front of the Spains’ house, from the building sites across the road. The idea is that he’ll spot her from there, he’ll want to know what she’s doing with all the stuff, but in order to find out, he’ll have to come back here. The houses are too close together for him to squeeze in between, so he can’t come over the wall and in by the back. He’ll have to come down Ocean View Walk.”

The top of the road was dark, shadowed by houses; the bottom stretch curved into moonlight. I said, “I’ll take the top of the road and the goggles. You take the bottom. Any movement, any at all, you let me know. If he does come up here, we’ll do our best to keep things quiet-it’d be nice not to alert the residents that something’s going on-but he may not give us the choice. The one thing we don’t forget for a second is that this guy is dangerous. Going on past form, there’s no reason to think he’s armed, but we’re going to act like he is. Armed or not, this is a rabid animal and we’re in his den. Remember exactly what he did down there, and take it for granted that, given the chance, he’d do the same to you and me.”

Richie nodded. He passed me the thermal-vision goggles and started tossing his things back into his holdall, fast and efficiently. I folded the map, stuffed Richie’s food wrappers into a plastic bag and tucked it away. A few seconds later the room was bare floorboards and breeze block again, like we had never been there. I slung our holdalls into a dark corner, out of the way.

Richie set himself up by the window-hole facing the bottom of the road, squatting in a slant of shadow by the sill, and pried a corner of plastic sheeting loose so he could see out. I checked the Spains’ house: our Fiona came into the kitchen carrying an armful of clothes, put them on the table and left again. Upstairs I could see, faint through Jack’s window, the glow of a light in Pat and Jenny’s bedroom. I pressed myself against the wall by the window overlooking the top of the road, and lifted the goggles.

They turned the sea invisible, a bottomless black. At the top of the street, the flat gray crisscross of scaffolding stretched away into the distance; an owl floated across the road, drifting on the air currents like a sheet of burning paper. The stillness went on and on.

I thought my eyelids were frozen wide open, but I must have blinked. There was no sound. One moment the top of the street was empty; the next he was standing there, blazing white and fierce as an angel between the shadowy ruins on either side. His face was almost too bright to look at. He stood still, listening, like a gladiator at the entrance to the ring: head up, arms held free from his sides, hands half closed, ready.

I didn’t breathe. I kept one eye on him and lifted a hand to catch Richie’s attention. When his head turned towards me, I pointed out the window and beckoned.

Richie crouched low and slid across the floor to the other side of my window like he was weightless. As he pressed his back against the wall, I saw his hand go to the butt of his gun.

Our man came down the road slowly, placing his feet carefully, his head turning to every tiny sound. There was nothing in his hands, no night-vision gear on his face; just him. In the gardens, the small glowing animals uncurled and bounded away from his approach. Radiant against that web of metal and concrete, he looked like the last man left on earth.

When he was one house away I put the goggles down, and that tall shining figure flicked to a huddle of black, trouble sliding down the night to land on your doorstep. I signaled to Richie and backed away from the window-hole, into the shadows. Richie eased himself into the far corner opposite me; for a moment I heard his fast breathing, till he caught it and stilled it. The first weight of our man’s hand on the metal bar sent a shiver vibrating all through the scaffolding, circling the house like a dark shimmer.

It grew as he climbed, a low thrumming like the pulse of a drum, and then it faded to silence. His head and shoulders appeared in the window, darker against dark. I saw his face turn to the corners, but the room was wide and the shadows hid us.

He swung in through the window with an ease that said he had done it a thousand times. The second his feet hit the floor and his body turned towards his lookout window, I came out of my corner and slammed into him from behind. He let out a hoarse shot of breath and staggered forward across the floor; I got an elbow around his neck, twisted his arm high behind his back with the other hand and slammed him up against a wall. The air went out of him in one sharp grunt. When his eyes opened, he was looking at Richie’s gun.

I said, “Police. Don’t move.”

Every muscle in his body was rigid; he felt like he was made of steel rods. I said, and my voice sounded cool and clipped and like someone else’s, “I’m going to handcuff you for everyone’s safety. Do you have anything on you that we should know about?”

He didn’t seem to hear me. I eased my hands off him, watching; he didn’t move, didn’t even flinch when I wrenched his wrists behind him and snapped the cuffs tight. Richie patted him down, fast and hard, tossing what he found into a small pile on the floor: a torch, a packet of tissues, a roll of mints. Wherever he had hidden his car, he had left his ID and his money and his keys with it. He had been traveling light, making sure there was nothing to give him away with even a clink.

I said, “I’m going to take the handcuffs off, so that you can climb down the scaffolding. I don’t expect you to try anything stupid; if you do, it won’t do anything except put me and my partner in a very bad mood. We’re going back to headquarters for a chat. Your belongings will be returned to you there. Any problems with any of that?”

He was somewhere else, or fighting hard to be. His eyes, narrowed against the moonlight, were fixed somewhere on the sky outside the window, over the Spains’ rooftop. “Great,” I said, when it was obvious I wasn’t going to get an answer. “I’m going to take that to mean there’s no problem. If anything changes, you can go right ahead and let me know. Now let’s go.”

Richie climbed down first, awkwardly, with one of the holdalls slung over each shoulder. I waited, holding the handcuff chain between our man’s wrists, till Richie gave me the thumbs-up from the ground; then I clicked the cuffs open and said, “Go. No sudden moves.”

When I took his shoulder and pointed him in the right direction, he woke up and stumbled across the bare floor. In the window-hole he stood still for a moment; I saw the thought go through his mind, but before I could say anything he must have realized that from that height he would be lucky to break anything more than his ankles. He swung himself out of the window and started climbing, docile as a dog.

This guy I used to know gave me the nickname back in training college, when I scored a scorcher of a goal in some football match. I let it stick because I thought it would give me something to live up to. In the second when I was alone, in that terrible room filled with moonlight and sea-roar and months of waiting and watching, a tiny part at the back of my mind thought: Forty-eight hours, four solves. Now there’s a scorcher. I understand how many people would call that sick, and I understand why, but that doesn’t change the fact: you need me.