Broken Harbour

10

We stuck to the uninhabited streets, Richie and me with our hands tucked through our man’s elbows, like we were helping our buddy home after a long night’s bad drinking. None of us said a word-most people would have at least a few questions if you slapped cuffs on them and hauled them off to a cop car, but not this guy. Slowly the sound of the sea subsided and left room for the rest of the night, bats shrilling, wind tugging at forgotten scraps of canvas; for a while teenagers’ jagged shouts reached us, thin and faraway, bounced back and forth off concrete and brick. Once I heard a harsh swallow that made me think our man might be crying, but I didn’t turn my head to look. He had called enough shots.

We put him in the back of the car, and Richie leaned on the bonnet while I moved out of earshot to make phone calls: sending the patrol floaters to hunt for a car parked somewhere not far from the estate, telling the bait floater she could go home, letting the night admin know we would need an interview room ready. Then we drove back to Dublin in silence. The haunted blackness of the estate, scaffolding bones looming up out of nowhere, stark against the stars; then the smooth speed of the motorway, cat’s-eyes flicking in and out of existence and the moon keeping pace off to one side, huge and watchful; then, gradually, the colors and movement of town building up around us, drunks and fast-food joints, the world coming back to life outside our sealed windows.

The squad room was quiet, just the two guys on call looking up from their coffees as we passed the door, to see who had been out night-hunting and was bringing something home. We put our man in the interview room. Richie undid the cuffs and I talked the guy through the rights sheet, in a bored drone like this was just meaningless paperwork. The word “solicitor” got a violent shake of his head; when I put the pen in his hand, he signed without a single question. The signature was a jerky squiggle that gave away nothing but an initial C. I picked up the sheet and left.

We watched him from the observation room, through the one-way glass. It was the first time I had had a proper look at him. Short-cropped brown hair, high cheekbones, a jutting chin with a couple of days’ worth of reddish stubble; he was wearing a black duffle coat that had seen plenty of use, a heavy roll-neck gray jumper and faded jeans, all dressed up for a night’s stalking. He had on hiking boots: the runners were gone. He was older than I had thought, and taller-late twenties, and not far off six foot-but he was so thin that he looked like the last stages of a hunger strike. It was the thinness that had minimized him into something younger, smaller, harmless. That illusion could have got him in the Spains’ door.

No cuts or bruises that I could see, but anything could be hidden under all those clothes. I turned the interview-room thermostat up higher.

It felt good, seeing him in that room. Most of our interview rooms could do with a shower, a shave and a full makeover, but I love every inch of them. Our territory fights on our side. In Broken Harbor he had been a shadow that moved through walls, an iodine scent of blood and seawater, with shards of moonlight stuck in his eyes. Now he was just a guy. They all are, once you get them between those four walls.

He sat hunched rigidly in the uncomfortable chair, staring down at his fists on the table like he was bracing himself for torture. He hadn’t even glanced around the room-linoleum pocked with old cigarette burns and lumps of chewing gum, walls scored with graffiti, bolted-down table and filing cabinet, the video camera’s dull red light watching him from a high corner-to get his bearings. I said, “What do we know about him?”

Richie was watching so intently that his nose was practically touching the glass. “He’s not on anything. At first I was thinking he could be on the gear, ’cause he’s so skinny, but no.”

“Not right now, anyway. That’s good for us: if we get anything, we don’t want him saying it was the drugs talking. What else?”

“Loner. Nocturnal.”

“Right. Everything says he’s more comfortable keeping his distance from other people, rather than making close contact-he got his kicks by watching, broke in when the Spains were out rather than when they were asleep. So when it comes time to push him, we want to get in close, get in his face, both of us at once. And since he’s nocturnal, we want the push to come towards dawn, when he’s starting to fade. Anything else?”

“No wedding ring. More than likely he lives alone: no one to notice when he’s out all night, ask him what he’s at.”

“Which would have its upside and its downside, as far as we’re concerned. No flatmate to testify that he got in at six on Tuesday morning and ran the washing machine for four hours straight, but on the other hand, no one for him to bother hiding things from. When we find his gaff, there’s a chance he’ll have left us a little present-the bloodstained clothes, that honeymoon pen. Maybe a trophy he took the other night.”

The guy stirred, groped at his face, rubbed clumsily at his mouth. His lips were swollen and cracked, like he had gone a long time without water.

Richie said, “He’s not working a nine-to-five. He could be unemployed, or self-employed, or maybe he does shift work or a part-time gig-something that means he can spend the night up in that nest when he wants to, without banjaxing himself for work the next day. Just going by the clothes, I’d say middle-class.”

“So would I. And he’s never been in the system before-his prints came up clean, remember. He probably doesn’t even know anyone who’s ever been in the system. He’s got to be disoriented and scared. That’s good stuff, but we want to save it for when we need it. We want to get him as relaxed as we can, see how far that takes us, then scare the living shite out of him when it comes to the big push. The good thing is, he won’t walk out on us before then. Middle-class guy, probably got respect for authority, doesn’t know the system… He’ll stay till we kick him out.”

“Yeah. Probably he will.” Richie was drawing absent, abstract patterns in the mist his breath had left on the glass. “And that’s all I can figure out about him. You know that? This fella’s organized enough to set up that nest, disorganized enough that he doesn’t even bother taking it down again. Clever enough to get himself into that house, thick enough to take the weapons away with him. He’s got enough self-control that he waited for months, but he can’t even wait two nights after the murder before he’s back up to his hide-and he must’ve known we’d be on the lookout, must’ve done. I can’t get a handle on him.”

On top of all that, the guy looked much too frail to have done this. I wasn’t fooled. Plenty of the most brutal predators I’ve caught looked soft as kittens, and they’re always at their tamest just after the kill, spent and sated. I said, “He’s got no more self-control than a baboon. None of them do. We’ve all wanted to kill someone, at some point in our lives-don’t tell me you haven’t. What makes these guys different from us is that they don’t stop themselves from actually doing it. Scratch the surface and they’re animals: screaming, shit-flinging, throat-ripping animals. That’s what we deal with. Never forget that.”

Richie didn’t look convinced. I said, “You think I’m being hard on them? Society’s given them a raw deal, and I should have a little more empathy?”

“Not exactly. Just… if he’s got no control, then how’d he manage to hold back for so long?”

I said, “He didn’t. We’re missing something.”

“How d’you mean?”

“Like you said, this guy spent at least a few months, probably more, just watching the Spains, maybe occasionally sneaking into the house when they weren’t around. That wasn’t his amazing self-control in action: it was because that was all he needed to get his fix. And then, all of a sudden, he comes charging out of his comfort zone: jumps from binoculars straight to full-on close contact. That didn’t come out of nowhere. Something happened, in this last week or so; something big. We’ll need to find out what that was.”

In the interview room, our man knuckled his eyes, stared at his hands like he was looking for blood, or tears. “And I’ll tell you one more thing,” I said. “He feels very emotionally connected to the Spains.”

Richie stopped drawing. “You think? I was thinking it wasn’t personal. The way he kept his distance…”

“No. If he were a professional, he’d be home by now: he’d have clocked that he’s not under arrest, and he’d never even have got into our car. And he isn’t a sociopath who saw them as just random objects that looked like fun, either. The soft kill on the kids, the close-contact kill on the adults, wrecking Jenny’s face… He had feelings for them. He thinks he was close to them. More than likely the only actual interaction they ever had was when Jenny smiled at him in the queue at Tesco; but in his head, at least, there was a connection there.”

Richie breathed on the glass again and went back to his patterns, more slowly this time. “You’re taking it as a definite that he’s our man,” he said. “Yeah?”

I said, “It’s early days to call anything definite.” There was no way to tell him that the drumming in my ears had swelled so high, in the car with this man at my shoulder, I had almost been afraid I would have us off the road. The man permeated the air around him with wrongness, strong and repellent as naphtha, as if he had been soaked in it. “But if you’re asking for my personal opinion, then yes. Hell yes. This is our man.”

The guy raised his head as if he had heard me, and his eyes, rimmed with painful-looking swells of red, skidded around the room. For a second they rested on the one-way glass. Maybe he watched enough cop shows to know what it was; maybe the thing that had fluttered through my skull in the car moved both ways, shrilled like a bat at the back of his neck to warn him I was there. For the first time, his eyes focused, like they were staring straight into mine. He took a quick deep breath and set his jaw, ready.

The tips of my fingers were prickling with how much I wanted to get in there. “We’ll let him wonder for another fifteen minutes,” I said. “Then you go in.”

“Just me?”

“He’ll see you as less of a threat than me. Nearer his age.” And there was the class gap, too: a nice middle-class boy could easily discount an inner-city kid like Richie as some idiot skanger. The lads would have been gobsmacked if they had seen me letting a brand-new newbie loose on this interrogation, but Richie wasn’t quite your ordinary rookie, and this felt like a two-man job. “Just settle him, Richie. That’s all. Find out his name, if you can. Get him a cup of tea. Don’t go anywhere near the case, and for the love of all that’s holy don’t let him ask for a lawyer. I’ll give you a few minutes with him, and then I’ll come in. OK?”

Richie nodded. He said, “You think we’ll get a confession out of him?”

Most of them never confess. You can show them their prints all over the weapon, the victim’s blood all over their clothes and CCTV footage of them whacking her over the head, and they’ll still be spewing out injured innocence and howling about frame-ups. In nine people out of ten, self-preservation goes deeper than sense, deeper than thought. You pray to get the tenth person, the one built with a crack in the self-preservation where something else runs deeper still-the need to be understood, the need to please you, sometimes even conscience. You pray for the one who, somewhere darker than the inside of bone, doesn’t want to save himself; for the one who stands at the top of the cliff and has to fight the urge to leap. Then you find that crack, and you press.

I said, “That’s what we’re aiming for. The Super comes in at nine; that gives us six hours. Let’s have this ready to hand over to him, all wrapped up and tied with a bow.”

Richie nodded again. He pulled off his jacket and three heavy jumpers and dropped them on a chair, leaving him narrow and gangly as a teenager in a long-sleeved navy T-shirt that had been washed thin. He stood at the glass, no fidgeting, and watched the guy hunch lower over the table until I checked my watch and said, “Go.” Then he ran a hand through his hair so it stood up on end, got two cups of water from the cooler, and went.

He did it nicely. He went in holding out a cup and saying, “Sorry, man, I meant to bring this in to you before, only I got caught up… Is that all right for you? Would you have a cup of tea instead, yeah?” His accent had got thicker. The class thing had occurred to him, too.

Our man had jumped half out of his skin when the door opened, and he was still catching his breath. He shook his head.

Richie hovered, looking fifteen. “You sure? Coffee?”

Another head-shake.

“Grand. You’ll let me know if you need more of this, yeah?”

The guy nodded and reached for the water. The chair rocked under his weight. “Ah, hang on,” Richie said. “He’s after giving you the dud chair.” Quick surreptitious glance at the door, like I might be behind it. “Go on: swap over. Have this one.”

Our man shuffled awkwardly across. Probably it made no difference-all the chairs in the interview rooms are chosen to be uncomfortable-but he said, so low I barely heard him, “Thanks.”

“No problem. Detective Richie Curran.” He held out a hand.

Our man didn’t take it. He said, “Do I have to tell you my name?” His voice was low and even, good to listen to, with a slight rough edge like it hadn’t got much use lately. The accent gave me nothing; he could have been from anywhere.

Richie looked surprised. “Do you not want to? Why not?”

After a moment he said, to himself, “… make any difference…” To Richie, with a mechanical handshake: “Conor.”

“Conor what?”

A fraction of a second. “Doyle.” It wasn’t, but that didn’t matter. Come morning we would find either his house or his car, or both, and strip them to the bones looking for, among other things, his ID. All we needed for now was something to call him.

“Nice to meet you, Mr. Doyle. Detective Kennedy’ll be here in a while, then yous can get started.” Richie balanced the edge of his arse on a corner of the table. “I’ll tell you now, I’m only delighted you showed up. I was dying to get out of there, I was. I know people pay good money to go camping up by the sea and all, but the countryside isn’t my style, know what I mean?”

Conor shrugged, a small, jerky movement. “It’s peaceful.”

“I’m not mad about peaceful. City boy, me; give me the noise and the traffic any day. And I was freezing my bollix off, as well. Are you from up there, are you?”

Conor glanced up sharply, but Richie was slugging at his water and watching the door, just making small talk while he waited for me. Conor said, “No one’s from Brianstown. They just move there.”

“That’s what I meant: are you living there, yeah? Jaysus, you couldn’t pay me enough.”

He waited, all mild innocuous curiosity, till Conor said, “No. Dublin.”

Not local. Richie had knocked out one angle and saved us a lot of hassle right there. He raised his cup in a cheerful toast. “Up the Dubs. No better place. And wild horses couldn’t drag us away, amn’t I right?”

Another shrug. “I’d live down the country. Depending.”

Richie hooked an ankle around a spare chair and pulled it over for his feet, getting comfortable for an interesting chat. “Would you, seriously? Depending on what?”

Conor wiped a palm up his jaw, hard, trying to pull it together: Richie was nudging him off balance, poking little holes in his concentration. “Dunno. If you had a family. Space for the kids to play.”

“Ah,” Richie said, pointing a finger at him. “There you go, see. I’m a single man: I need somewhere I can get a few drinks in, meet a few girls. Can’t live without that, know what I mean?”

I had been right to send him in. He was relaxed as a sunbather and doing a beautiful job. I was willing to bet that Conor had gone into that room with the intention of keeping his lip firmly zipped, for years if necessary. Every detective, even Quigley, has knacks, little things that he does better than anyone else around: we all know who to call if we want a witness reassured by the expert, or a quick bit of intimidation done right. Richie had one of the rarest knacks of all. He could make a witness believe, against all the evidence, that they were just two people talking, the same way the two of us had talked while we waited in that hide; that Richie was seeing not a solve in the making, not a bad guy who needed locking up for the good of society, but another human being. It was good to know.

Conor said, “That gets old, the going out. You stop wanting it.”

Richie’s hands went up. “Take your word for that, man. What do you start wanting instead?”

“Something to come home to. A wife. Kids. A bit of peace. The simple stuff.”

It moved through his voice, slow and heavy, like a shadow looming under dark water: grief. For the first time, I felt a flick of empathy for the guy. The disgust that came with it almost shot me into the interview room to get to work on him.

Richie held up crossed index fingers. “Sooner you than me,” he said cheerfully.

“Wait.”

“I’m twenty-three. Long while to go before the biological clock kicks in.”

“Wait. Nightclubs, all the girls made up to look exactly like each other, everyone pissed off their heads so they can act like someone they’re not. After a while, it’ll make you sick.”

“Ah. Got burned, yeah? Brought home a babe and woke up with a hound?”

Richie was grinning. Conor said, “Maybe. Something like that.”

“Been there, man. The beer goggles are a bastard. So where do you go looking for chicks, if the clubs don’t do it for you?”

Shrug. “I don’t go out much.”

He was starting to turn his shoulder to Richie, block him out: time to change things up. I went for the interview room with a bang: sweeping the door open, spinning a chair over to face Conor-Richie slid off the table and into a chair next to me, fast-throwing myself back in it, shooting my cuffs. “Conor,” I said. “I don’t know about you, but I’d love to get this sorted out fast enough that we can all get some sleep tonight. What do you say?”

Before he could come up with an answer, I held up a hand. “Whoa, hang on there, Speedy Gonzalez. I’m sure you’ve got plenty to say, but you’ll get your turn. Let me share a few things with you first.” They need to be taught that you own them now; that from this moment on, you’re the one who decides when they talk, drink, smoke, sleep, piss. “I’m Detective Kennedy, this is Detective Curran, and you’re just here to answer some questions for us. You’re not under arrest, nothing like that, but we need a chat. I’m pretty sure you know what all this is about.”

Conor shook his head, one heavy shake. He was dropping back towards that weighted silence, but I was fine with that, for the moment anyway.

“Ah, man,” Richie said reproachfully. “Come on. What d’you think it’s about? The Great Train Robbery?”

No response. “Leave the man alone, Detective Curran. He’s only doing what he was told, aren’t you, Conor? Wait your turn, I said, and that’s what he’s doing. I like that. It’s good to have the ground rules clear.” I steepled my fingers on the table and examined them thoughtfully. “Now, Conor, I’m sure spending your night like this doesn’t make you a happy man. I can see your point there. But if you look at this properly, if you really look at it, this is your lucky night.”

He shot me a look of pure jagged incredulity.

“It’s true, my friend. You know and we know that you shouldn’t have been setting up camp in that house, because it’s not yours, now is it?”

Nothing. “Or maybe I’m wrong,” I said, with the corner of a grin. “Maybe if we check with the developers, they’ll tell us you put down a nice big chunk of deposit, will they? Do I owe you an apology, fella? Are you on that property ladder after all?”

“No.”

I clicked my tongue and wagged a finger at him. “I didn’t think so. Naughty, naughty: just because no one’s living there, son, that doesn’t mean you get to move in, bag and baggage. That’s still breaking and entering, you know. The law doesn’t take a day off just because you fancy a holiday home and no one else was using it.”

I was piling on the patronizing as thick as I could, and it was needling Conor out of his silence. “I didn’t break anything. Just walked in.”

“Why don’t we let the lawyers explain why that’s beside the point? If things go that far, of course, which”-I raised a finger-“they don’t need to. Because like I said, Conor, you’re a very lucky young man. Detective Curran and I aren’t actually that interested in a pissant B and E charge-not tonight. Let’s put it this way: when a couple of hunters go out for the night, they’re looking for big game. If a rabbit, say, is all they can find, they’ll take that; but if the rabbit puts them on the trail of a grizzly bear, they’re going to let the bunny hop along home while they go chasing the grizzly. Are you following me?”

That got me a disgusted glance. Plenty of people take me for a pompous git way too fond of the sound of his own voice, which is absolutely fine with me. Go ahead and dismiss me; go right ahead and drop your guard.

“What I’m saying, son, is that you are, metaphorically speaking, a bunny. If you can point us at something bigger, off you hop. Otherwise, your fuzzy little head’s going over our mantelpiece.”

“Point you at what?”

The flare of aggression in his voice would have told me, all on its own, that he didn’t need to ask. I ignored it. “We’re on the hunt for info, and you’re the very man to give it to us. Because when you were picking a house for your bit of breaking and entering, you struck it lucky. As I’m pretty sure you’ve noticed, your little nest looks straight down into the kitchen of Number Nine Ocean View Rise. Like you had your very own reality-show channel, playing twenty-four-seven.”

“World’s most boring reality-show channel,” Richie said. “Would you not have found, like, a strip club? Or a bunch of girls that go around topless?”

I pointed a finger at him. “We don’t know it was boring, now do we? That’s what we’re here to find out. Conor, my man, you tell us. The people who live at Number Nine: boring?”

Conor turned the question over, testing for dangers. In the end he said, “A family. Man and woman. Little girl and little boy.”

“Well, no shit, Sherlock, pardon my French. That much we’ve worked out for ourselves; there’s a reason they call us detectives. What are they like? How do they spend their time? Do they get on? Is it snuggles or screaming matches down there?”

“Not screaming matches. They used to…” That grief stirring again, dark and massive, under his voice. “They’d play games.”

“What kind of games? Like Monopoly?”

“Now I see why you picked them,” Richie said, rolling his eyes. “The excitement, yeah?”

“Like once they built a fort in that kitchen, cardboard boxes and blankets. Played cowboys and Indians, all four of them; kids climbing all over him, her lipstick for war paint. Evenings, him and her used to sit out in the garden, after the kids were in bed. Bottle of wine. She’d rub his back. They’d laugh.”

Which was the longest speech we’d heard him make. He was dying to talk about the Spains, gagging for the chance. I nodded away, pulled out my notebook and my pen and made squiggles that could have been notes. “This is good stuff, Conor my man. This is exactly what we’re after. Keep it coming. You’d say they’re happy? It’s a good marriage?”

Conor said quietly, “I’d say it was a beautiful marriage. Beautiful.”

Was. “Never saw him do anything nasty to her?”

That snapped his head round towards me. His eyes were gray and cold as water, amid the swollen red. “Like what?”

“You tell me.”

“He used to bring her presents all the time: small stuff, fancy chocolate, books, candles-she liked candles. They’d kiss when they passed in the kitchen. All those years together, and they were still mad about each other. He’d have died sooner than hurt her. OK?”

“Hey, fair enough,” I said, raising my hands. “A man’s got to ask.”

“There’s your answer.” He hadn’t blinked. Under the stubble his skin had a rough, windburned look, like he had spent too much time in cold sea air.

“And I appreciate it. That’s what we’re here for: to get the facts straight.” I made a careful note in my book. “The kids. What are they like?”

Conor said, “Her.” The grief surged in his voice, close to the surface. “Like a little doll, little girl in a book. Always in pink. She had wings she’d wear, fairy wings-”

“‘She’? Who’s ‘she’?”

“The little girl.”

“Oh, come on, fella, don’t play games. Of course you know their names. What, they never yelled to each other in the garden? The mum never called the kids in for dinner? Use their names, for God’s sake. I’m too old to keep all this him-her-she-he stuff straight.”

Conor said quietly, like he was being gentle with the name, “Emma.”

“That’s right. Go on about Emma.”

“Emma. She loved stuff around the house: putting on her little apron, making Rice Krispie buns. She had a little chalkboard; she’d line up her dolls in front of it and play teacher, teach them their letters. Tried to teach her brother, too, only he wouldn’t stay still long enough; knocked over the dolls and legged it. Peaceful, she was. Happy-natured.”

Was again. “And her brother? What’s he like?”

“Loud. Always laughing, shouting-not even words, just shouting to make noise, because that was so funny it creased him up. He-”

“His name.”

“Jack. He’d knock over Emma’s dolls, like I said, but then he’d come help her pick them back up, kiss them better. Give them sips of his juice. Once Emma was home sick, a cold or something: he brought her stuff all day long, his toys, his blanket. Sweet kids, both of them. Good kids. Great.”

Richie’s feet shifted, under the table: he was working hard to let that go by. I tapped my pen off my teeth and examined my notes. “Let me tell you something interesting that I’ve noticed, Conor. You keep saying ‘used to.’ They used to play family games, Pat used to bring Jenny presents… Did something change?”

Conor stared at his reflection in the one-way glass like he was measuring a stranger, volatile and dangerous. He said, “He lost his job. Pat.”

“How do you know?”

“He was there during the day.”

And so had Conor been, which didn’t exactly point to him being a productive little worker bee. “No more cowboys and Indians after that? No more cuddles in the garden?”

That cold gray flash again. “Being out of work wrecks people’s heads. Not just him. Plenty of people.”

The quick leap to the defense: I couldn’t tell whether that was on Pat’s behalf or his own. I nodded thoughtfully. “Is that how you’d describe him? Head-wrecked?”

“Maybe.” That sediment of wariness was starting to build up again, stiffening his back.

“What gave you that impression? Give us a few examples.”

A one-shouldered jerk that could have been a shrug. “Don’t remember.” The finality in his voice said he wasn’t planning to.

I leaned back in my chair and took leisurely fake notes, giving him time to settle. The air was heating up, pressing around us dense and scratchy as wool. Richie blew out air loudly and fanned himself with his top, but Conor didn’t seem to notice. The coat was staying on.

I said, “That’s going back a few months, Pat losing his job. When did you start spending time out at Ocean View?”

A second’s silence. “A while back.”

“A year? Two?”

“Maybe a year. Maybe less. I didn’t keep track.”

“And how often do you get up there?”

A longer silence, this time. The wariness was starting to crystallize. “Depends.”

“On what?”

Shrug.

“I’m not looking for a stamped time sheet here, Conor. Just give us a ballpark. Every day? Once a week? Once a month?”

“Couple of times a week, maybe. Less, probably.”

Which meant every other day, at least. “What time? Day or night?”

“Nights, mostly. Sometimes daytime.”

“What about night before last? Did you head up to your little holiday home?”

Conor leaned back in his seat, folded his arms and focused on the ceiling. “I don’t remember.”

End of conversation. “OK,” I said, nodding. “You don’t want to talk about that just yet, fine with us. We can talk about something else instead. Let’s talk about you. What do you do, when you’re not kipping in abandoned houses? Got a job?”

Nothing. “Ah, for God’s sake, man,” Richie said, rolling his eyes. “Like pulling teeth. What d’you think we’re gonna do? Arrest you for being in IT?”

“Not IT. Web design.”

And a web designer would have known more than enough about computers to wipe the Spains’. “See, Conor? How hard was that? Web design’s nothing to be ashamed of. There’s good money in it.”

A humorless sniff of a laugh, up at the ceiling. “You think?”

“Recession,” Richie said, snapping his fingers and pointing at Conor. “Am I right? You were doing grand, all up and coming and web-designing away, and then the crash came and bang, just like that, on the dole.”

That hard almost-laugh again. “I wish. I’m self-employed. No dole for me; when the work went, the money went.”

“Shit,” Richie said suddenly, eyes widening. “Are you homeless, man? Because we can give you a hand there. I’ll make a few calls-”

“I’m not bloody homeless. I’m grand.”

“No reason to be embarrassed. These days there’s loads of people-”

“Not me.”

Richie looked skeptical. “Yeah? D’you live in a house or a flat?”

“Flat.”

“Where?”

“Killester.” Northside: just right for a regular commute up to Ocean View.

“Sharing with who? Girlfriend? Flatmates?”

“No one. Just me. All right?”

Richie turned up his hands. “Only trying to help.”

“I don’t need your help.”

“I’ve got a question, Conor,” I said, twirling my pen between my fingers and watching it with interest. “Your flat got running water?”

“What’s it to you?”

“I’m a cop. I’m nosy. Running water?”

“Yeah. Hot and cold.”

“Electricity?”

Conor said, “For fuck’s sake,” to the ceiling.

“Mind your language, son. Got electricity?”

“Yeah. Electricity. Heating. A cooker. Even a microwave. What are you, my mum?”

“Couldn’t be further from it, fella. Because my question is, if you’ve got a nice cozy bachelor pad with all mod cons and even a microwave, why the hell are you spending your nights pissing out the window of a freezing rattrap in Brianstown?”

There was a silence. I said, “I’m going to need an answer, Conor.”

His chin set hard. “Because. I like it.”

Richie stood up, stretched and started moving around the edges of the room, in the loose-kneed, bobbing lope that says Trouble on any backstreet. I said, “That’s not going to do the job, fella. Because-and stop me if this isn’t news to you-two nights ago, when you don’t remember what you were doing, someone got into the Spains’ house and murdered the lot of them.”

He didn’t bother to pretend that came as a shock. His mouth tightened like a vicious cramp had wrenched through him, but nothing else moved.

I said, “So, naturally, we’re interested in anyone who has links to the Spains-especially anyone whose link is what you might call out of the ordinary, and I’d say your playhouse qualifies there. You could even say we’re very interested. Am I right, Detective Curran?”

“Fascinated,” Richie said, from behind Conor’s shoulder. “Is that the word I’m after, yeah?” He was making Conor edgy. The bad-news walk wasn’t intimidating him, nothing like that, but it was breaking his concentration, keeping him from slamming his silence shut around himself. I realized that I was liking working with Richie, more and more.

“‘Fascinated’ would work, all right. Even ‘obsessed’ wouldn’t be out of place. Two little kids are dead. Personally, and I don’t think I’m alone here, I’m willing to do whatever it takes to put away the cock-sucking bastard who killed them. I’d like to think any decent member of society would do the same.”

“Dead right,” said Richie approvingly. The circles were getting tighter, faster. “Are you with us on that, Conor, yeah? You’re a decent member of society, aren’t you?”

“Haven’t got a clue.”

I said pleasantly, “Well, let’s find out, shall we? We’ll start with this: in the course of your year or so of breaking and entering-you didn’t keep track, of course, you just liked it out there-did you happen to notice anyone unsavory hanging around Ocean View?”

Shrug.

“Is that a no?”

Nothing. Richie sighed noisily and started skimming the sides of his shoe soles off the linoleum on each step, with a horrible squealing noise. Conor winced. “Yeah. It’s a no. I saw no one.”

“What about the night before last? Because we need to cut the crap, Conor: you were out there. See anyone interesting?”

“I’ve got nothing to tell you.”

I raised my eyebrows. “You know, Conor, I doubt that. Because I’m only seeing two options here. Either you saw what happened, or you are what happened. If it’s Door Number One, then you need to start talking right now. If it’s Door Number Two… well, that’s the only reason why you would want to keep your mouth shut. Isn’t it?”

People tend to react, when you accuse them of murder. He sucked his teeth, stared at a thumbnail.

“If you can see an option I’ve missed, old son, then by all means share it with us. All donations gratefully accepted.”

Richie’s shoe squealed inches behind Conor, and he jumped. He said, and there was an edge to his voice, “Like I said: I’ve got nothing to tell you. Pick your own options; not my problem.”

I swept my pen and notebook out of my way and leaned forward across the table, into his face, leaving him nowhere else to look. “Yeah, it is, old son. It bloody well is. Because me and Detective Curran and the entire police force of this country, every single one of us is out to bring down the fucker who slaughtered this family. And you’re right smack in our crosshairs. You’re the guy who’s on the spot for no good reason, who’s been spying on the Spains for a year, who’s filling us up with bullshit when any innocent man in the world would be helping us out… What do you think that says to us?”

Shrug.

“It says you’re a murdering scumbag, fella. I’d say that’s very much your problem.”

Conor’s jaw tightened. “If that’s what you want to think, there’s nothing I can do about it.”

“Jesus,” Richie said, rolling his eyes. “Self-pity much?”

“Call it what you want.”

“Come on. There’s loads you can do about it. You could give us a hand, just for starters: tell us everything you saw going down around the Spains’ gaff, hope something in there helps us out. Instead, you’re gonna sit here and sulk like some kid who’s got caught smoking hash? Grow up, man. Seriously.”

That got Richie a filthy look, but Conor wasn’t biting. He kept his mouth shut.

I eased back into my seat, adjusted the knot in my tie and changed the note to something gentler, almost curious. “Do we have it wrong, Conor? Maybe it wasn’t like it looks. We weren’t there, me and Detective Curran; there could have been a lot more to it than we realize. This might not be murder at all; it could have been manslaughter. I can even see how it could have started out as self-defense, and then things got out of hand. I’m willing to accept that. But we can’t do that unless you tell us your side of the story.”

Conor said, to the air somewhere over my head, “There’s no fucking story.”

“Oh, but there is. That’s not really up for debate, is it? The story might be ‘I wasn’t in Brianstown that night, and here’s my alibi.’ Or it might be ‘I was out there and I saw someone dodgy hanging about, and here’s a description.’ Or ‘The Spains caught me breaking in, they went for me and I had to defend myself.’ Or ‘I was up in my hide getting good and stoned when everything went black, and the next thing I remember I was sitting in my bathtub, covered in blood.’ Any one of those could fly with us, but we need to hear it. Otherwise, we’re going to assume the worst. Surely you can see that. Can’t you?”

Silence, so packed with stubborn that you could feel it elbowing you. There are detectives, even nowadays, who would have fixed this problem with a few rabbit punches to the kidneys, either on a toilet trip or while the video camera was mysteriously on the blink. I had been tempted once or twice, when I was younger, had never given in-handing out slaps is for morons like Quigley, who have nothing else in their arsenal-and I had had that under control for a long time. But in that thick, overheated stillness I understood for the first time exactly how fine the line was, and how very easily crossed. Conor’s hands holding the edge of the table were long-fingered and strong, big capable hands with the tendons standing out and the cuticles bitten bloody. I thought of what they had done, of Emma’s cat pillow and the gap in her front teeth and Jack’s soft pale curls, and I wanted to pound a lump hammer down on those hands until they were crunching pulp. The thought of doing it made the blood shake in my throat. It horrified me, how deep in my gut I wanted it, how simple and natural a desire it seemed.

I tamped it down hard and waited until my heart rate subsided. Then I sighed and shook my head, more in sorrow than in anger. “Conor, Conor, Conor. What do you think this is going to accomplish? Tell me that, at least. Do you seriously believe we’re going to be so impressed by your little act that we’ll send you off home and forget the whole thing? ‘I like a man who sticks to his guns, old son, don’t you worry about those nasty murders’?”

He stared at the air, narrow-eyed and intent. The silence stretched. I hummed to myself, adding a beat with my fingertips on the table, and Richie perched on the edge of the table jiggling his knee and cracking his knuckles with real dedication, but Conor had gone past that. He barely knew we were there.

Finally Richie did an ostentatious stretch-groan-yawn routine and checked his watch. “Here, man, are we going to be doing this all night?” he wanted to know. “’Cause if we are, I need coffee to keep up with the pace. Thrill a minute, this.”

I said, “He’s not going to answer you, Detective. We’re getting the silent treatment.”

“Can we get it while we’re in the canteen, yeah? I swear, I’m gonna fall asleep right here if I don’t get some coffee into me.”

“No reason why not. This little shit is making me sick to my stomach anyway.” I clicked my pen shut. “Conor, if you need to get your sulk out of the way before you can talk to us like an adult human being, be our guest, but we’re not going to sit around and watch you do it. Believe it or not, you’re not the center of the universe. We’ve got plenty of more urgent things to do than watch a grown man act like a spoiled kid.”

Not a blink. I clipped my pen to my notebook, tucked them back in my pocket and gave it a pat. “We’ll be back when we get a moment. If you need to go to the jacks, you can give the door a bang and hope someone hears. See you around.”

On the way out Richie whipped Conor’s cup off the table, catching the bottom delicately between thumb and fingertip. I pointed at it and told Conor, “Two of our favorite things: prints and DNA. Thanks, fella. You saved us a load of time and hassle, right there.” Then I gave him a wink and a thumbs-up, and slammed the door behind us.

In the observation room, Richie asked, “Was that all right, me getting us out of there? I just thought… I mean, we’d hit a wall, like. And I figured it was easier for me to pull the plug without losing face, yeah?”

He was rubbing one foot off the opposite ankle and looking apprehensive. I pulled an evidence bag out of the cabinet and tossed it to him. “You did fine. You’re right: time to regroup. Any thoughts?”

He dropped the cup into the evidence bag and looked around for a pen; I passed him mine. “Yeah. Know something? He’s ringing a bell. The face.”

“You’ve been looking at him for a long time, it’s late, you’re shattered. Sure your mind’s not playing tricks?”

Richie squatted beside the table to label the bag. “Yeah, I’m sure. I’ve seen him before. I’m wondering was it back when I was in Vice, maybe.”

The observation room is on the same thermostat as the interview room. I tugged my tie looser. “He’s not in the system.”

“I know. I’d remember if I’d arrested him. But you know yourself: some guy catches your eye and you can tell he’s up to something, but there’s nothing you can pin on him, so you just hang on to that face and wait till it shows up again. I’m wondering…” He shook his head, dissatisfied.

“Put it on the back burner. It’ll come to you. When it does, let me know; we need to ID this guy, and soon. Anything else?”

Richie initialed the bag, ready to hand in to the evidence room, and gave my pen back. “Yeah. Winding him up won’t get us anywhere, not with this fella. We had him pissed off there, all right, but the angrier he gets, the quieter he gets. We need another angle.”

I said, “We do. The distraction stuff was good-nicely done there-but it’s taken us as far as it can. And intimidation won’t work, either. I was wrong about one thing: he’s not afraid of us.”

Richie shook his head. “Nah. He’s on guard, all right, big time, but scared… Nah. And the thing is, he should be. I’d still say he’s a virgin; he’s not acting like he knows the drill. This whole thing should have him crapping his kacks by now. Why doesn’t it?”

In the interview room Conor was still and taut, hands spread flat on the table. There was no way he could have heard us, but I lowered my voice all the same. “Overconfidence. He thinks he covered his tracks, figures we’ve got nothing on him unless he talks.”

“Maybe, yeah. But he has to know we’ve got a full team going over that house with a fine-tooth comb, looking for anything he left behind. That should be worrying him.”

“They’re arrogant bastards, a lot of them. Think they’re smarter than we are. Don’t let that bother you; it’ll work for us, in the long run. Those are the ones that go to pieces when you whip out something they can’t ignore.”

“What if…” Richie said diffidently, and stopped. He was twirling the bag back and forth, looking at it, not at me. “Never mind.”

“What if what?”

“I was only going to say. If he’s got a solid alibi, something like that, and he knows sooner or later we’ll run up against it…”

I said, “You mean, what if he’s feeling safe because he’s innocent.”

“Yeah. Basically.”

“Not a chance, chum. If he had an alibi, why not just tell us and go home? You think he’s pulling our chains for kicks?”

“Could be. He’s not mad about us.”

“Even if he were innocent as a baby-and he’s not-he shouldn’t be this cool. The innocent ones get just as frightened as the guilty ones-more, a lot of the time, because they’re not arrogant pricks. They shouldn’t, obviously, but there’s no telling them that.”

Richie glanced up and lifted a noncommittal eyebrow. I said, “If they’ve done nothing wrong, then the fact is, they’ve got nothing to be afraid of. But the facts aren’t always the point.”

“I guess. Yeah.” He was rubbing at the side of his jaw, where stubble should have been by this stage. “Another thing, but. Why isn’t he pointing us at Pat? We’ve given him a dozen openings. It’d be easy as pie: ‘Yeah, Detective, now that you mention it, your man Pat went loopy after he lost his job, used to smack his wife around, beat the shite out of his kids, saw him threaten them with a knife just last week…’ He’s not thick; he must’ve seen his chance. Why didn’t he grab it?”

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 life 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.

If I got into it with him over the motive, he would win, and you don’t let them win. I said, “How did you get into the house?”

“Key.”

“To which door?”

A splinter of a pause. “Back.”

“Where’d you get that?”

That splinter again, bigger this time. He was being careful. “Found it.”

“When?”

“A while back. Few months, maybe more.”

“Where?”

“Street outside. Pat dropped it.”

I could feel it on my skin, the sideslipping twist to his voice that said Lie, but I couldn’t put my finger on where or why. Richie said, from the corner behind Conor’s shoulder, “You couldn’t see the street from your hide. How’d you know he’d dropped the key?”

Conor thought that over. “Saw him come in from work in the evening. Later that night, I went for a wander around, spotted the key, figured he had to be the one that lost it.”

Richie wandered over to the table, pulled out a chair facing Conor. “No you didn’t, man. There’s no street lighting. What are you, Superman? See in the dark?”

“It was summer. Bright till late.”

“You were prowling round their gaff while it was still bright? While they were still awake? Come on, man. What were you, looking to get arrested?”

“So maybe it was dawn. I found the key, I got it copied, I got in. End of story.”

I said, “How many times?”

That tiny pause again, while he tested answers in his head. I said crisply, “Don’t waste your time, old son. There’s no point in bullshitting me. We’re well past that. How many times were you in the Spains’ house?”

Conor was rubbing at his forehead with the back of his wrist, trying to hold it together. That sheetrock wall of stubbornness was starting to waver. Adrenaline can only keep you going for so long; any minute now, he was going to be too exhausted to sit up straight. “A few. A dozen, maybe. What’s it matter? I was there night before last. I’ve told you.”

It mattered because he knew his way around the house: even in darkness, he would have been able to find his way up the stairs, into the children’s rooms, to their beds. Richie asked, “Ever take anything away with you?”

I saw Conor dig for the energy to say no, and give up. “Little things, only. I’m not a thief.”

“What kind of stuff?”

“A mug. Handful of rubber bands. A pen. Nothing worth anything.”

I said, “And the knife. Let’s not forget the knife. What did you do with it?”

That should have been one of the tough questions, but Conor turned towards me like he was grateful for it. “Into the sea. The tide was up.”

“Where’d you throw it from?”

“The rocks. South end of the beach.”

We were never getting that knife back. It was halfway to Cornwall by now on some long cold current, rocking fathoms deep among seaweed and soft blind creatures. “And the other weapon? The one you used to hit Jenny?”

“Same.”

“What was it?”

Conor’s head fell back and his lips parted. The grief that had been looming under his voice, all night long, had made its way to the surface. It was that grief, not fatigue, that was leaching the willpower out of him, scouring his concentration away. It had eaten him alive, from the inside out; it was all that was left.

He said, “It was a vase. Metal one, silver, with a heavy base on it. Simple thing, it was; beautiful. She used to put a couple of roses in it, have it on the table when she made fancy dinners for the two of them…”

He made a small sound between a swallow and a gasp, the sound of someone sliding underwater. I said, “Let’s rewind a little, shall we? Start from the point when you entered the house. What time was it?”

Conor said, “I want to sleep.”

“As soon as you’ve talked us through it. Was anyone awake?”

“I want to sleep.”

We needed the full story, blow by blow and packed with details that only the killer would know, but it was heading for six o’clock and he was heading for the level of fatigue that a defense attorney could use. I said gently, “OK. You’re nearly there, son. I’ll tell you what: we’ll just get what you’ve told us in writing, and then we’ll take you somewhere you can get a bit of kip. Fair enough?”

He nodded, a lopsided jerk, like his head had suddenly turned too heavy for his neck. “Yeah. I’ll write it down. Just leave me alone while I do it. Can you do that?”

He was at the end of his strength, way past trying to get smart with his statement. “Sure,” I said. “If that’s what works for you, not a problem. We’ll need to know your real name, though. For the statement sheet.”

For a second I thought he was going to stonewall us again, but all the fight was gone. “Brennan,” he said, dully. “Conor Brennan.”

I said, “Well done.” Richie moved quietly to the corner table and passed me a statement sheet. I found my pen and filled in the header, in strong block capitals: CONOR BRENNAN.

I put him under arrest, cautioned him again, went through the rights sheet again. Conor didn’t even look up. I put the statement sheet and my pen into his hands, and we left him there.

“Well well well,” I said, tossing my notebook onto the table in the observation room. Every cell in my body was fizzing like champagne with pure triumph; I felt like throwing a Tom Cruise, jumping up on the table shouting I love this job! “Now that was a whole lot easier than I was expecting. Here’s to us, Richie my friend. Do you know what we are? We’re a bloody great team.”

I gave him a pumping handshake and a clap on the shoulder. He was grinning. “Felt like that, all right.”

“No two ways about it. I’ve had a lot of partners in my time, and I can tell you, hand on heart: that was the real thing. There are guys who partner for years and still don’t work together that smoothly.”

“It’s good, yeah. It’s good stuff.”

“By the time the Super gets in, we’ll have that statement signed, sealed and delivered to his desk. I don’t need to tell you what this is going to do for your career, do I? Let’s see that prick Quigley give you hassle now. Two weeks on the squad, and you’re part of the biggest solve of the year. How does it feel?”

Richie’s hand slid out of mine too fast. He still had the grin, but there was something unsure in it. I said, “What?”

He nodded at the one-way glass. “Look at him.”

“He’ll write it up just fine. Don’t you worry about that. He’ll have second thoughts, of course he will, but they won’t kick in till tomorrow: emotional hangover. By then, we’ll have our file half ready to send to the DPP.”

“It’s not that. The state of that kitchen… You heard Larry: the struggle was full-on. Why isn’t he more beat up?”

“Because he isn’t. Because this is real life, and sometimes it doesn’t go exactly the way you’d expect it to.”

“I just…” The grin was gone. Richie was digging his hands into his pockets, staring at the glass. “I have to ask, man. You’re positive he’s our guy?”

The fizz started to fade out of my veins. I said, “That’s not the first time you’ve asked me that.”

“I know, yeah.”

“So let’s hear it. What’s got up your arse?”

He shrugged. “Dunno. You’ve been awful sure all along, is all.”

The anger shot through me like a muscle spasm. “Richie,” I said, very carefully keeping my voice under control. “Let’s review for a second, shall we? We’ve got the sniper’s nest that Conor Brennan set up to stalk the Spains. We’ve got his own admission that he broke into their house multiple times. And now, Richie, now we’ve got a fucking confession. Go ahead and tell me, old son: what the fuck else do you want? What the fuck would it take to make you sure?”

Richie was shaking his head. “We’ve got plenty. I’m not arguing there. But even back when we had nothing, only that hide, you were positive.”

“So what? I was right. Did you miss that part? You’re getting your knickers in a knot because I got there ahead of you?”

“Makes me nervous, being too sure too early. It’s dangerous.”

The jolt hit me again, hard enough to clench my jaw. “You’d rather keep an open mind. Is that it?”

“Yeah. I would.”

“Right. Good idea. For how long? Months? Years? Till God sends choirs of angels to sing you the guy’s name in four-part harmony? Do you want us to be standing here in ten years’ time, telling each other, ‘Well, it could be Conor Brennan, but then again, it could be the Russian Mafia, we might want to explore that possibility a little more thoroughly before we make any rash decisions’?”

“No. I’m only saying-”

“You have to get sure, Richie. You have to. There is no other option. Sooner or later, you shit or you get off the pot.”

“I know that. I’m not talking about any ten years.”

The heat was the kind you get in a cell in a bad August: thick, motionless, clogging your lungs like wet cement. “Then what the hell are you talking about? What’ll it take? In a few hours’ time, when we get our hands on Conor Brennan’s car, Larry and his boys are going to find the Spains’ blood all over it. Around the same time, they’re going to match his fingerprints to the prints they found all over that hide. And a few hours after that, assuming that please God we get hold of the runners and the gloves, they’re going to prove that that bloody shoeprint and those bloody handprints were made by Conor Brennan. I’d bet a month’s salary on it. Will that make you sure?”

Richie rubbed at the back of his neck and grimaced. I said, “Oh, for Christ’s sake. Right. Let’s hear it. I guaran-damn-tee you, by the end of today, we’ll have physical proof he was in that house when that family got killed. How are you planning to explain that away?”

Conor was writing, head bent low over the statement sheet, arm curved protectively around it. Richie watched him. He said, “This guy loved the Spains. Like you said. Say, let’s just say, he’s up in his hide the other night-maybe Jenny’s on the computer, he’s watching her. Then Pat comes downstairs and goes for her. Conor freaks out, goes to break up the fight: legs it down from his hide and over the wall, lets himself in through their back door. But by then it’s too late. Pat’s dead or dying, Conor thinks Jenny is too-probably he doesn’t check too carefully, not with all the blood and the panic. Maybe he’s the one that brought her over to Pat, so they could be together.”

“Touching. How do you explain the wiped computer? The missing weapons? What’s all that about?”

“Same again: he cares about the Spains. He doesn’t want Pat taking the rap. He wipes the computer ’cause he thinks maybe whatever Jenny was doing on there could be what triggered Pat-or he knows for definite that it was. Then he takes the weapons and dumps them, so it’ll look like an intruder.”

I took a second and a breath, to make sure I wouldn’t bite his head off. “Well, it’s a pretty little fairy story, old son. Poignant, is that the word I’m looking for? And that’s all it is. It’s fine as far as it goes, but you’re skipping right past this: why the holy hell did Conor confess?”

“Because. What happened in there.” Richie nodded at the glass. “Man, you practically told him you were going to put Jenny Spain in a straitjacket if he didn’t give you what you were after.”

I said, and my voice was cold enough to warn a much stupider man than Richie, “Do you have a problem with the way I’m doing my job, Detective?”

His hands went up. “I’m not picking holes. I’m only saying: that’s why he confessed.”

“No, Detective. No, it bloody well isn’t. He confessed because he did it. All that crap I gave him about loving Jenny, all that did was pick the lock; it didn’t put anything behind the door that wasn’t already fucking there. Maybe your experience has been different from mine, maybe you’re just better at this job, but I have a hard enough time getting my suspects to confess to what they did. I can safely say I’ve never, in all my career, managed to get one of them to confess to something he didn’t do. If Conor Brennan says he’s our man, then it’s because he is.”

“He’s not like most of them, though, is he? You said it yourself, we’ve both been saying: he’s different. There’s something weird going on there.”

“He’s weird, yeah. He’s not Jesus. He’s not here to give his life for Pat Spain’s sins.”

Richie said, “It’s not just him that’s weird. What about the baby monitors? Those weren’t your man Conor’s doing. And the holes in the walls? There was something going on inside that house.”

I leaned back against the wall with a thump and folded my arms. It might have been just the fatigue, or the thin yellowy-gray dawn smearing the window, but that champagne fizz of victory was well and truly gone. “Tell me, old son: why the hate for Pat Spain? Is this some kind of chip on your shoulder, because he was a good solid pillar of the community? Because if it is, I’m warning you now: get rid of it, sharpish. You’re not always going to be able to find a nice middle-class boy to pin things on.”

Richie came at me fast, finger pointing; for a second I thought he was going to jab me in the chest, but he had enough sense left to stop himself. “It’s got nothing to do with class. Nothing. I’m a cop, man. Same as yourself. I’m not some thicko skanger you brought in as a favor because it’s Take A Knacker To Work Day.”

He was too close and much too angry. I said, “Then act like a cop. Step back, Detective. Get a grip on yourself.”

Richie stared me out of it for another second; then he wheeled away, flung himself back against the glass and shoved his hands deep into his pockets. “You tell me, man: why are you so dead set that it isn’t Patrick Spain? Why the love?”

I had no obligation to explain myself to some jumped-up little newbie, but I wanted to; I wanted to say it, shove it deep into Richie’s head. “Because,” I said, “Pat Spain followed the rules. He did everything people are supposed to do. That’s not how killers live. I told you from the start: things like this don’t come out of nowhere. All that crap the families give the media-‘Oh, I can’t believe he would do this, he’s such a Boy Scout, never done anything bad in his life, they were the happiest couple in the world’-that’s garbage. Every time, Richie, every single time, it turns out that the guy was a Boy Scout except for a record as long as your arm, or he’d never done anything bad except for his little habit of terrorizing the shit out of his wife, or they were the happiest couple in the world except for the minor fact that he was banging her sister. There’s not one hint, anywhere, that any of that applied to Pat. You’re the one who said it: the Spains did their best. Pat was a trier. He was one of the good guys.”

Richie didn’t move. “Good guys break.”

“Seldom. Very, very seldom. And there’s a reason for that. It’s because the good guys have stuff to hold them in place, when the going gets tough. They’ve got jobs, families, responsibilities. They’ve got the rules they’ve been following their whole lives. I’m sure all that stuff sounds uncool to you, but here’s the fact: it works. Every day, it keeps people from crossing over the line.”

“So,” Richie said flatly, “because Pat was a nice middle-class boy. A pillar of the community. That’s why he couldn’t be a killer.”

I didn’t want to have this argument, not in an airless observation room at some ungodly hour of the morning with sweat sticking my shirt to my back. I said, “Because he had things to love. He had a home-OK, it was in the arsehole of nowhere, but one look at it should have told you that Pat and Jenny loved every inch of the place. He had the woman he’d been loving ever since they were sixteen; still mad about each other, that’s what Brennan said. He had two kids who climbed all over him. That’s what holds the good guys together, Richie. They’ve got places to put their hearts into. They’ve got people to take care of. People to love. That’s what stops them from going over the edge, when a guy who wasn’t weighted down would be in free fall. And you’re trying to convince me that Pat just turned around one day and blew all that away, for no reason at all.”

“Not for no reason. You said yourself: he could’ve been about to lose the lot. The job was gone, the gaff was going; the wife and kids could’ve been about to go as well. It happens. All over this country, it’s been happening. The triers are the ones that snap, when trying doesn’t do any good.”

All of a sudden I was exhausted, two sleepless nights digging their claws in and dragging me down with all their weight. I said, “The one who snapped was Conor Brennan. Now there’s a man who’s got nothing left to lose: no work, no home, no family, not even his own mind. I’ll bet you any amount of money you want, when we start looking into his life we’re not going to find a close-knit circle of friends and loved ones. Nothing’s holding Brennan in place. He’s got nothing to love; nothing except the Spains. He’s spent the last year living like some kind of cross between a hermit and the Unabomber, all so he could stalk them. Even your own little theory hinges on the fact that Conor was a delusional freak show who was spying on them at three in the bloody morning. The guy’s not right, Richie. He’s not OK. There’s no way around that.”

Behind Richie, in the harsh white light of the interview room, Conor had put down the pen and was pressing his fingertips into his eyes, rubbing them in a grim, relentless rhythm. I wondered how long it had been since he had slept. “Remember what we talked about? The simplest solution? It’s sitting behind you. If you find evidence that Pat was a vicious sonofabitch who was beating the shit out of his family while he got ready to leave them for a Ukrainian lingerie model, then come back to me. Until then, I’m putting my money on the psycho stalker.”

Richie said, “You told me yourself: ‘psycho’ isn’t a motive. All that about being upset because the Spains weren’t happy, that’s nothing. They’d been in trouble for months. You’re telling me the other night he just decided out of the blue, so fast he didn’t even have time to clean out his hide: There’s nothing on the telly, I know what I’ll do, I’ll head on down to the Spains’ and kill the lot of them? Come on, man. Here’s you saying Pat Spain didn’t have a motive. What the hell was this fella’s motive? Why the hell would he want any of them dead?”

One of the many ways that murder is the unique crime: it’s the only one that makes us ask why. Robbery, rape, fraud, drug dealing, all the filthy litany, they come with their filthy explanations built in; all you have to do is slot the perp into the perp-shaped hole. Murder needs an answer.

Some detectives don’t care. Officially, they’re right: if you can prove whodunit, nothing in the law says you need to prove why. I care. When I pulled what looked like a random drive-by, I spent weeks-after we had the shooter in custody, after we had enough evidence to sink him ten times over-having in-depth conversations with every monosyllabic cop-hating lowlife in his shit-hole neighborhood, until someone let slip that the victim’s uncle worked in a shop and had refused to sell the shooter’s twelve-year-old sister a packet of cigarettes. The day we stop asking why, the day we decide that it’s acceptable for the answer to a severed life to be Just because, is the day we step away from that line across the cave entrance and invite the wild to come howling in.

I said, “Trust me: I’m going to find out. We’ve got Brennan’s associates to talk to, we’ve got his flat to search, we’ve got the Spains’ computer-and Brennan’s, if he’s got one-to go through, we’ve got forensic evidence waiting to be analyzed… Somewhere in there, Detective, there’s a motive. Forgive me if I don’t have every piece of the puzzle in place within forty-eight hours of getting the bloody case, but I promise you, I will find them. Now let’s get this fucking statement and go home.”

I headed for the door, but Richie stayed put. He said, “Partners. That’s what you said this morning, remember? We’re partners.”

“Yes. We are. So?”

“So you don’t make the decisions for the both of us. We make them together. And I say we keep looking at Pat Spain.”

The stance-feet planted apart, shoulders squared-told me he wasn’t going to budge without a fight. We both knew that I could shove him back in his box and slam the lid on his head. One bad report from me and Richie was off the squad, back to Motor Vehicles or Vice for another few years, probably forever. All I had to do was touch on that, one delicate hint, and he would back off: finish Conor’s paperwork, leave Pat Spain to rest in peace. And that would be the end of that tentative thing that had begun in the hospital car park, less than twenty-four hours earlier.

I closed the door again. “All right,” I said. I let myself slump back against the wall and tried to squeeze tension out of my shoulder. “All right. Here’s what I suggest. We’ll need to spend the next week or so investigating Conor Brennan, to waterproof our case-that’s assuming he’s our man. I suggest that, during that time, you and I also conduct a parallel investigation into Pat Spain. Superintendent O’Kelly would like that idea even less than I do-he’d call it a waste of time and manpower-so we won’t make a song and dance about it. If and when it does come up, we’re just making sure Brennan’s defense isn’t going to find anything on Pat that they can use as a red herring in court. It’ll mean a lot of very long shifts, but I can handle that if you can.”

Richie already looked ready to fall asleep standing up, but he was young enough that a few hours would fix that. “I can handle it.”

“I thought so. If we turn up anything solid on Pat, then we’ll regroup and review. How does that strike you?”

He nodded. “Good,” he said. “Sounds good.”

I said, “The word for this week is discreet. Until and unless we come up with solid evidence, I’m not going to spit on Pat Spain’s body by calling him a murderer to the people who loved him, and I’m not going to watch you do it either. If you let any of them twig that he’s being treated as a suspect, we’re done. Do I make myself clear?”

“Yeah. Crystal.”

In the interview room, the pen was still down on the scribbled statement sheet and Conor was sagging over them, the heels of his hands pressed into his eyes. I said, “We all need sleep. We’ll hand him over for processing, get the report typed up, leave instructions for the floaters, and then we’ll go home and crash for a few hours. We’ll meet back here at noon. Now let’s go see what he’s got for us.”

I scooped my jumpers off the chair and bent to stuff them back into the holdall, but Richie stopped me. “Thanks,” he said.

He was holding out his hand and looking me straight in the face, steady green eyes. When we shook, the strength in his grip took me by surprise.

“No thanks needed,” I said. “It’s what partners do.”

The word hung in the air between us, bright and fluttering as a lit match. Richie nodded. “Sound,” he said.

I gave him a quick clap on the shoulder and went back to packing up. “Come on. I don’t know about you, but I’m dying for some kip.”

We threw our stuff into our holdalls, binned the litter of paper cups and coffee stirrers, switched off the lights and closed the observation-room door. Conor hadn’t moved. At the end of the corridor the window was still bleary with that tired city dawn, but this time the chill didn’t touch me. Maybe it was all that youthful energy beside me: the victory fizz was back in my veins and I felt wide awake again, straight-backed and strong and rock-solid, ready for whatever came next.