Broken Harbour

13

Fiona was waiting for us outside HQ, drooping against a lamppost. In the circle of smoky yellow light, with the hood of her red duffle coat pulled up against the cold, she looked like some small lost creature out of fireside stories. I ran a hand over my hair and locked Dina down in the back of my mind. “Remember,” I said to Richie, “she’s still on the radar.”

Richie caught a deep breath, like the exhaustion had blindsided him all of a sudden. He said, “She didn’t give Conor the keys.”

“I know. But she knew him. There’s history there. We need to know a lot more about that history before we can rule her out.”

Fiona straightened up as we came closer. She had lost weight in the last two days; her cheekbones poked out sharply, through skin that had faded to a papery gray. I could smell the hospital off her, disinfected and polluting.

“Ms. Rafferty,” I said. “Thank you for coming in.”

“Could we just… Would it be OK if we made this quick? I want to get back to Jenny.”

“I understand,” I said, stretching out an arm to guide her towards the door. “We’ll be as fast as we can.”

Fiona didn’t move. Her hair straggled around her face in limp brown waves; it looked like she had washed it in a sink with hospital soap. “You said you got the man. The man who did this.”

She was talking to Richie. He said, “We’ve got someone in custody in connection with the crimes. Yeah.”

“I want to see him.”

Richie hadn’t spotted that coming. I said smoothly, “I’m afraid he’s not here. We’ve got him in jail at the moment.”

“I need to see him. I need…” Fiona lost her train of thought, shook her head and shoved back hair. “Can we go there? To the jail?”

“It doesn’t really work that way, Ms. Rafferty. It’s out of hours, we’d have to fill in the paperwork, then it could take a few hours to bring him over here, depending on the available security… If you want to get back to your sister, we’ll need to leave that for another time.”

Even if I had left her room to argue, she didn’t have the energy. After a moment she said, “Another time. I can see him another time?”

“I’m sure we can work something out,” I said, and held out my arm again. This time Fiona moved, out of the circle of lamplight and into the shadows, towards the door of HQ.

One of the interview rooms is set up to be gentle: carpet instead of linoleum, clean pale-yellow walls, non-institutional chairs that don’t leave your arse bruised, a watercooler, an electric kettle and a basket of little sachets of tea and coffee and sugar, actual mugs instead of foam cups. It’s for victims’ families, fragile witnesses, suspects who would take the other rooms as an affront to their dignity and stalk out. We put Fiona there. Richie settled her-it was nice, having a partner who could be trusted with someone that shaky-while I went down to the incident room and threw a few bits of evidence into a cardboard box. By the time I got back, her coat was on the back of her chair and she was curled around a steaming mug of tea like her whole body needed warming. Without the coat she was slight as a child, even in the loose jeans and oversized cream cardigan. Richie was sitting opposite her, elbows propped on the table, halfway through a long reassuring story about an imaginary relative who had been saved from some dramatic combination of injuries by the doctors at Jenny’s hospital.

I slid the box unobtrusively under the table and took a chair next to Richie. He said, “I was just telling Ms. Rafferty, her sister’s in good hands.”

Fiona said, “The doctor said in a couple of days they’re going to lower the dose of painkillers. I don’t know how Jenny’s going to cope. She’s in really bad shape anyway-obviously-but the painkillers help, half the time she thinks it’s just a bad dream. When she comes off them, and the whole thing hits her… Can they give her something else? Antidepressants, or something?”

“The doctors know what they’re at,” Richie said gently. “They’ll help her get through.”

I said, “I’m going to ask you to do something for us, Ms. Rafferty. While you’re here, I need you to forget about what happened to your family. Put it out of your mind; just concentrate, one hundred percent, on answering our questions. Believe me, I know that sounds impossible, but it’s the only way you can help us put this man away. This is what Jenny needs from you right now-what they all need from you. Can you do that for them?”

This is the gift we offer them, people who loved the victims: rest. For an hour or two they get to sit still and-guilt-free, because we gave them no choice-stop hurling their minds on the jagged shards of what happened. I understand how immense that is, and how priceless. I saw the layers in Fiona’s eyes, like I’d seen them in hundreds of others’: relief, and shame, and gratitude.

She said, “OK. I’ll try.”

She would tell us things she had never wanted to mention, to give herself a reason to keep talking. “We appreciate that,” I said. “I know it’s difficult, but you’re doing the right thing.”

Fiona balanced her tea on her thin knees, cupping it between her hands, and gave me her full attention. Already her spine had uncurled a notch. I said, “Let’s start at the beginning. There’s a good chance none of this will be relevant, but it’s important for us to get all the information we can. You said Pat and Jenny got together when they were sixteen, isn’t that right? Can you tell me how they met?”

“Not exactly. We’re all from the same area, so we knew each other from around, ever since we were little kids, like in primary school; I don’t remember the exact first time any of us met. When we got to like twelve or thirteen, a bunch of us started hanging out together-just messing about on the beach, or Rollerblading, or we’d go down to Dun Laoghaire and hang out on the pier. Sometimes we went into town, for the cinema and then Burger King, or on the weekends we’d go to the school discos if there was a good one on. Just kid stuff, but we were close. Really close.”

Richie said, “There’s no one like the mates you make when you’re a teenager. How many in the gang?”

“Jenny and me. Pat and his brother Ian. Shona Williams. Conor Brennan. Ross McKenna-Mac. There were a couple of others who hung out with us sometimes, but that was the real gang.”

I rummaged in my cardboard box, found a photo album-pink cover, flowers made of sequins-and flipped it open at a Post-it. Seven teenagers perched on a wall, squashed together to fit in the shot, laughter and brandished ice cream cones and bright T-shirts. Fiona had braces, Jenny’s hair was a shade darker; Pat had his arms wrapped around her-his shoulders were already as broad as a man’s, but his face was a boy’s, open and ruddy-and she was taking a huge mock-bite out of his ice cream. Conor was all gangly legs and arms, doing a goofy chimpanzee impression, falling off the wall. I said, “Is this the gang?”

Fiona put her tea down on the table-too quickly; a few drops slopped out-and reached out a hand to the album. She said, “That’s Jenny’s.”

“I know,” I said gently. “We needed to borrow it, just for a while.”

It made her shoulders jump, the sudden feel of our fingers probing deep into their lives. “God,” she said, involuntarily.

“We’ll have it back to Jenny as soon as possible.”

“Can you… If you get done with it in time, maybe could you just not tell her you had it? She doesn’t need anything else to deal with. This…” Fiona spread her hand across the photo. She said, so quietly I barely heard her, “We were really happy.”

I said, “We’ll do our best. You can help there, too. If you can give us all the info we need, then we can avoid asking Jenny these questions.”

She nodded, without looking up. “Well done,” I said. “Now, this has to be Ian. Am I right?” Ian was a couple of years younger than Pat, skinnier and brown-haired, but the resemblance was obvious.

“Yeah, that’s Ian. God, he looks so young there… He was really shy, back then.”

I tapped Conor’s chest. “And who’s this?”

“That’s Conor.”

It came out promptly and easily, no tension around it. I said, “He’s the guy holding Emma in her christening photo, the one in her room. He’s her godfather?”

“Yeah.” The mention of Emma made Fiona’s face tighten up. She pressed her fingertips on the photo like she was trying to push herself into it.

I said easily, moving on to the next face, “Which makes this guy Mac, right?” Chubby and bristle-haired, outflung arms and pristine white Nikes. You could have told what generation these kids were just from their clothes: no hand-me-downs, nothing mended, everything was brand-new and brand name.

“Yeah. And that’s Shona.” Red hair, the kind that would have been frizzy if she hadn’t spent a lot of time with the straighteners, and skin that I would have bet was freckled under the fake tan and careful makeup. For a strange second I almost felt sorry for these kids. When I was that age, my friends and I were all poor together; it had very little to recommend it, but at least it had involved less effort. “Her and Mac, they were the ones who could always make us laugh. I’d forgotten her looking like that. She’s blond now.”

I asked, “So you all stay in touch?” I caught myself hoping the answer was yes-not for investigative reasons, but for Pat and Jenny, stranded on their cold deserted island, sea winds blowing. It would have been good to know that some roots had held strong for them.

“Not really. I have the others’ phone numbers, but it’s been ages. I should ring them, tell them, but I just… I can’t.”

She brought her mug to her mouth to hide her face. “Leave the numbers with us,” Richie said helpfully. “We’ll do it. No reason you should have to break the news.”

Fiona nodded, without looking at him, and fumbled in her pockets for her phone. Richie ripped a page out of his notebook and passed it to her. As she wrote I asked, moving her back towards safer ground, “It sounds like you were a pretty close-knit bunch. How did you get out of touch?”

“Just life, mostly. Once Pat and Jenny and Conor went to college… Shona and Mac are a year younger than them, and me and Ian are another year, so we weren’t on the same buzz any more. They could go to pubs, and proper clubs, and they were meeting new people at college-and without the three of them, the rest of us just didn’t… It wasn’t the same.” She handed the paper and pen back to Richie. “We all tried-at first we all still saw each other all the time. It was weird because suddenly we had to schedule stuff days in advance and someone was always pulling out at the last minute, but we did hang out. Gradually, though, it just got to be less and less. Even up until a couple of years ago, we still met up for a pint every few weeks, but it just… it stopped working.”

She had her hands wrapped around the mug again, tilting it in circles and watching the tea swirl. The smell of it was doing its job, making this alien place feel homey and safe. “Actually, it probably stopped working a long time before that. You can see it in the photos: we stop being jigsawed together like in that one there, instead we’re just these elbows and knees stuck out at each other, all awkward… We just didn’t want to see it. Pat, especially. The less it worked, the harder he tried. We’d be sitting on the pier or somewhere, and Pat’d be spread out till he was practically stretching, trying to keep close to all of us, make it feel like one big gang again. I think he was proud of it, that he still hung out with the same friends he’d had since he was a kid. That meant something to him. He didn’t want to let it go.”

She was unusual, Fiona: perceptive, acute, sensitive; the kind of girl who would spend a long time alone thinking about something she didn’t understand, picking away at it until the knot unraveled. It made her a useful witness, but I don’t like dealing with unusual people. “Four guys, three girls,” I said. “Three couples and an odd man out? Or just a gang of mates?”

Fiona almost smiled, down at the photo. “A gang of mates, basically. Even when Jenny and Pat started going out, it didn’t change things as much as you’d think. Everyone had seen it coming for ages, anyway.”

I said, “I remember you saying you dreamed about someone loving you the way Pat loved Jenny. The other lads were no prizes, no? You didn’t bother giving it a go with any of them?”

She blushed. The rosiness drove the gray out of her face, turned her young and vivid. For a moment I thought it was for Pat, that he had been filling up the place other boys could have had, but she said, “I actually did. Conor… we went out, just for a while. Four months, the summer I was sixteen.”

Which was practically marriage, at that age. I caught the tiny shift of Richie’s feet. I said, “But he treated you badly.”

The blush brightened. “No. Not badly. I mean, he was never mean to me, nothing like that.”

“Really? Most kids that age, they can be pretty cruel.”

“Conor never was. He was… he’s a sweet guy. Kind.”

I said, “But…?”

“But…” Fiona rubbed at her cheeks, like she was trying to wipe the flush away. “I mean, I was kind of startled when he even asked me out-I always wondered if maybe he was into Jenny. Nothing he said, just… you know how you get a vibe? And then, once we were going out, he… it felt like… I mean, we had a great time, we had a laugh, but he always wanted to do stuff together with Pat and Jenny. Like go to the cinema with them, or go hang out on the beach with them, or whatever. All his body, all the angles of him always pointed Jenny’s way. And when he looked at her… he lit up. He’d tell some joke, and on the punch line he’d look at her, not at me…”

And there was our motive, the oldest one in the world. In a strange way, it was comforting, knowing that I had been right, way back at the beginning: this hadn’t blown in off the wide sea like some killer gale and crashed into the Spains at random. It had grown out of their own lives.

I could feel Richie practically thrumming, beside me, with how badly he wanted to move. I didn’t look at him. I said, “You thought it was Jenny he wanted. He was going out with you to get closer to her.”

I tried to soften it, but it came out brutal all the same. She flinched. “I guess. Sort of. I think maybe partly that, and partly he was hoping, if we were together, we’d be like them; like Jenny and Pat. They were…”

On the page facing the group shot was a photo of Pat and Jenny-taken the same day, going by the clothes. They were side by side on the wall, leaning into each other, faces turned together, close enough that their noses brushed. Jenny was smiling up at Pat; his face looking down at her was absorbed, intent, happy. The air around them was a hot, sweet summer-white. Far behind their shoulders, a slip of sea was blue as flowers.

Fiona’s hand hovered over the photo, like she wanted to touch but couldn’t do it. She said, “I took that.”

“It’s very good.”

“They were easy to shoot. Most of the time, when you’re taking a shot of two people, you have to be careful with the space in between them, how it breaks up the light. With Pat and Jenny, it was like the light didn’t break, just kept going straight across the gap… They were something special. They both had a load going for them anyway-they were both really popular at school, Pat was great at rugby, Jenny always had a load of guys after her-but together… They were golden. I could’ve watched them all day. You looked at them and you thought, That. That’s how it’s supposed to be.”

Her fingertip brushed their clasped hands, skated away. “Conor… his parents were separated, his dad was over in England or somewhere-I’m not positive, Conor never talked about him. Pat and Jenny were the happiest couple he’d ever known. It was like he wanted to be them, and he thought if we went out together, we might… I didn’t put all this stuff into words at the time, or anything, but afterwards, I thought maybe…”

I asked, “Did you talk to him about it?”

“No. I was too embarrassed. I mean, my sister…” Fiona ran her hands through her hair, pulling it forward to hide her cheeks. “I just broke it off. It wasn’t that big a deal. It wasn’t like I was in love with him. We were just kids.”

But it must have been a big deal, all the same. My sister… Richie shoved back his chair and headed across to switch on the electric kettle again. He said easily, over his shoulder, “I remember you told us Pat got jealous of other guys fancying Jenny, back when you were teenagers. Was that Conor, yeah?”

That brought Fiona’s head up, but he was shaking a coffee sachet and looking at her with simple interest. She said, “He wasn’t jealous like you mean. He just… he’d noticed it, too. So when I broke up with Conor, Pat got me on my own a couple of days later and asked me was that why. I didn’t want to tell him, but Pat… he’s really easy to talk to. I always told him stuff. He was like my big brother. So we ended up talking about it.”

Richie whistled. “When I was a young fella,” he said, “I would’ve been raging if my mate was after my girlfriend. I’m not the violent type, but he’d’ve got a smack in the puss.”

“I think Pat thought about it. I mean”-a sudden flash of alarm-“he wasn’t the violent type either, not ever, but like you said… He was pretty angry. He’d called round to our house to see me-Jenny was out shopping-and when I told him he just walked out. He was white; his face looked like it was made out of something solid. I was actually scared-not that I thought he’d do anything to Conor, I knew he wouldn’t, but I just… I thought what if everyone found out, it’d smash the gang to pieces, everything would be horrible. I wished…” She ducked her head. More quietly, down to her mug: “I wished I’d kept my stupid mouth shut. Or just never gone near Conor to begin with.”

I said, “It was hardly your fault. You couldn’t have known. Or could you?”

Fiona shrugged. “Probably not. I felt like I could’ve, though. Like, why would he be into me when Jenny was around?” Her head was tucked down lower.

There it was again, that glimpse of something deep and tangled, stretched between her and Jenny. I said, “That must have been pretty humiliating.”

“I survived. I mean, I was sixteen; everything was humiliating.”

She was trying to turn it into a joke, but it fell flat. Richie gave her a grin, as he leaned over her shoulder to take her mug, but she passed it to him without catching his eye. I said, “Pat wasn’t the only one who had a right to be pissed off. Weren’t you angry, too? With Jenny, or Conor, or both?”

“I wasn’t that kind of kid. I just felt like it was my own fault. For being such an idiot.”

I asked, “And Pat didn’t get physical with Conor after all?”

“I don’t think so. Neither of them had bruises or anything, not that I saw. I don’t know exactly what happened. Pat phoned me the next day and said not to worry about it, forget we ever had the conversation. I asked him what happened, but all he’d say was that it wasn’t going to be a problem any more.”

In other words, Pat had kept control, dealt neatly with a nasty situation and kept the drama to a minimum. Conor, meanwhile, had been smacked down good and hard by Pat, humiliated even more excruciatingly than Fiona, and left in no doubt that he didn’t have a chance in hell with Jenny. This time I did look at Richie. He was messing with tea bags.

I asked, “And was it a problem after that?”

“No. Never. None of us ever said anything about it. Conor was extra nice to me for a while, like maybe he was trying to make up for things going wrong-except he always was nice to me anyway, so… And I got the feeling he was keeping his distance from Jenny-nothing too obvious, but he made sure it was never just the two of them going anywhere, stuff like that. Basically, though, everything went back to normal.”

Fiona had her head bent, picking bobbles of fluff off the sleeve of her cardigan, and the residue of that blush was still on her cheeks. I asked, “Did Jenny find out?”

“That I’d broken up with Conor? She couldn’t exactly miss it.”

“That he had been interested in her.”

The tinge of red deepened again. “I think she did, actually. I mean, I actually think she might have known all along. I never told her, and no way would Conor have, or Pat-he’s really protective, he wouldn’t have wanted to worry her. But one night, a couple of weeks after that stuff with Pat happened, Jenny came into my room-we were getting ready for bed, she was already in her pajamas. She was just standing there, messing with my hair clips, sticking them on the ends of her fingers and stuff. In the end I was like, ‘What?’ She goes, ‘I’m really sorry about you and Conor.’ I said something like, ‘I’m fine, I don’t care’-I mean, it had been weeks, she’d already said it a load of times, I didn’t know what she was getting at-but she went, ‘No, seriously. If it was my fault-if I could’ve done anything differently… I mean, I’m so, so sorry, that’s all.’”

Fiona laughed, a small wry breath. “God, we were both dying of embarrassment. I was like, ‘No, it wasn’t your fault, why would it be your fault, I’m fine, good night…’ I just wanted her to leave. Jenny-for a second I thought she was going to say something else, so I stuck my head in the wardrobe and started throwing clothes around, like I was getting out stuff for the next day. When I looked around, she’d gone. We never talked about it again, but that’s why I figured she knew. About Conor.”

“And she was worried that you felt she’d been leading him on,” I said. “Did you?”

“I never even thought about it.” Fiona caught my questioning eyebrow, and her eyes skipped away. “Well. I mean, I thought about it, but I never blamed her for… Jenny liked flirting. She liked getting attention from guys-she was eighteen, of course she did. I don’t think she encouraged Conor, exactly, but I think she knew he was into her, and I think she enjoyed it. That’s all.”

I asked, “Do you think she did anything about it?”

Fiona’s head snapped up and she stared at me. “Like what? Like telling him to back off? Or like getting together with him?”

I said blandly, “Either one.”

“She was going out with Pat! Like seriously going out, not just kid stuff. They were in love. And Jenny’s not some kind of two-timing- That’s my sister you’re talking about.”

I raised my hands. “I’m not doubting for a second that they were in love. But a teenage girl, just starting to realize that she’s going to spend the rest of her life with the same man: she could panic, feel like she needed one little moment with another guy before she settled down. That wouldn’t make her a slut.”

Fiona was shaking her head, hair flying. “You don’t get it. Jenny- When she does something, she does it properly. Even if she hadn’t been crazy about Pat-and she was-she’d never cheat on anyone. Not even a kiss.”

She was telling the truth, but that didn’t mean she was right. Once Conor’s mind started breaking loose from its moorings, one old kiss could have grown into a million sweet possibilities, swaying just out of reach. “Fair enough,” I said. “What about confronting Conor? Would she have done that?”

“I don’t think so. I mean, what for? What good would it have done? It would’ve just embarrassed everyone, and maybe messed up Pat and Conor. Jenny wouldn’t have wanted that. She’s not some drama queen.”

Richie poured boiling water. “I’d have said Pat and Conor were already well messed up, no? I mean, even if Pat didn’t give Conor a few slaps that day, he wasn’t a holy martyr. He couldn’t exactly keep on being mates like nothing had happened.”

“Why not? It’s not like Conor had done anything. They were best friends; they weren’t going to let something like that wreck everything. Is any of this…? Why…? I mean, it was like eleven years ago.”

Fiona was starting to look wary. Richie shrugged, dumping a tea bag in the bin. “I’m only saying: they must’ve been pretty close, if they got past something like that. I’ve had good mates in my time, but I’ve got to say, any of that carry-on and they’d’ve been on their bikes.”

“They were. Close. We all were, but Pat and Conor, they were different. I think…” Richie handed her a fresh mug of tea; she swirled the spoon in it absently. She was concentrating, feeling for the words. “I always thought it was because of their dads. Conor’s dad, like I told you, he wasn’t around, and Pat’s dad died when he was like eight… That makes a difference. To guys, especially. There’s something about guys who had to be the man of the family when they were just kids. Guys who had to be too responsible, too early. It shows.”

Fiona glanced up; our eyes met, and for some reason hers skipped away, too quickly. “Anyway,” she said. “They had that in common. I guess it was a big deal to them both, having someone around who understood. Sometimes they used to go for walks, just the two of them-like down the beach, or wherever. I used to watch them. Sometimes they wouldn’t even talk; just walk, like close together, so their shoulders were practically touching. In step. They’d get back looking calmer; smoothed out. They were good for each other. When you’ve got a friend like that, you’d do a lot to hang on to him.”

The sudden, painful flare of envy caught me by surprise. I was a loner, my last few years in school. I could have done with a friend like that.

Richie said, “You would, all right. I know you said college got in the way, but I’d say it took more than just that to make you lot drop each other.”

Fiona said, unexpectedly, “Yeah, it did. I think when you’re kids, you’re less… defined? Then you get older and you start deciding what kind of person you want to be, and it doesn’t always match up with what your friends are turning into.”

“I know what you mean. Me and my mates from school, we still meet up, but half of us want to talk about gigs and Xbox, and the other half want to talk about the color of baby shite. Lots of long silences, these days.” Richie slid into his seat, handed me a mug of coffee and took a big slug of his own. “So who went what way, in your gang?”

“At first it was mostly Mac and Ian. They wanted to be, like, rich guys about town-Mac works for an estate agent, Ian does something in banking, I’m not even sure what. They started going to all the super-trendy places, like drinking in Café en Seine and then on to Lillie’s, places like that. When we’d all meet up, Ian would be telling you how much he paid for every single thing he was wearing, and Mac would be, like, shouting about how some girl had been all over him the night before and the tide wouldn’t take her out, but he was in the mood for some charity work so he threw her a length… They thought I was an idiot for going into photography-specially Mac-and he kept telling me I was an idiot and I was never going to make the big bucks and I should grow up, and I needed to buy myself some decent clothes so I’d have a chance at bagging a guy who could look after me. And then Ian’s company sent him to Chicago and Mac was mostly in Leitrim, selling apartments in these big developments down there, so we got out of touch. I figured…”

She turned pages in the album, gave a wry little smile to a shot of the four lads making duck faces and faux-gangster hand signs. “I mean, an awful lot of people went like that during the boom. It’s not like Mac and Ian were going out of their way to be tossers; they were just doing what everyone else was. I figured they’d outgrow it. Up until then, they’re no fun to be around, but they’re still good guys, underneath. People you knew when you were teenagers, the ones who saw your stupidest haircut and the most embarrassing things you’ve done in your life, and they still cared about you after all that: they’re not replaceable, you know? I always thought we’d get back on track, someday. Now, after this… I don’t know.”

The smile was gone. I asked, “Conor didn’t go to Lillie’s with them?”

A momentary shadow of the smile flitted back. “God, no. Not his style.”

“He’s more of a loner?”

“Not a loner. I mean, he’d be down the pub having a laugh as much as anyone, but the pub wouldn’t be Lillie’s. Conor’s kind of intense. He never had any time for trendy stuff; he said that was letting other people make your decisions for you, and he was old enough to make his own. And he thought all the my-credit-card-is-bigger-than-your-credit-card stuff was idiotic. He said that to Ian and Mac, that they were turning into a pair of brain-dead sheep. They didn’t take it too well.”

“An angry young man,” I said.

Fiona shook her head. “Not angry. Just… what I said before. They didn’t match up any more, and that bothered all three of them. They took it out on each other.”

If I stayed on Conor much longer, she was going to start wondering. “What about Shona? Who did she stop matching up with?”

“Shona…” Fiona shrugged, eloquently. “Shona’s somewhere out there being the girl version of Mac and Ian. A lot of fake tan, a lot of labels, a lot of friends with fake tans and labels, and they’re bitchy-not once in a while, the way everyone is, but all the time. When we met up, she’d keep on making little snide comments about Conor’s haircut, or my clothes, and she’d get Mac and Ian laughing along-she was funny, she always was, but it didn’t use to be vicious funny. Then this one time a few years ago I texted her to see if she was on for pints, just like normal, and she basically texted me back saying she had got engaged-we hadn’t even met her boyfriend, all we knew was he was loaded-and she would die of embarrassment if her fiancé ever saw her with someone like me, so keep an eye on the Social and Personal sections for her wedding photos, bye!” Another dry little shrug. “Her, I’m not positive she’s going to outgrow it.”

“What about Pat and Jenny?” I asked. “Did they want to be cool kids about town, too?”

Pain arced across Fiona’s face, but she gave her head a quick jerk and shook it away, reached for her mug. “Sort of. Not like Ian and Mac, but yeah, they liked going to the in places, wearing the right stuff. For them, though, the big deal was always each other. Getting married, getting a house, having kids.”

“Last time we talked, you mentioned that you and Jenny spoke every day, but you hadn’t seen each other in a long time. You drifted too. Was that why? She and Pat were on their own little domestic buzz, and it didn’t match with yours?”

She flinched. “That sounds awful. But yeah, I guess that was it. The further they got down that road, the further they got from the rest of us. Once Emma came, they were all about bedtime routines and putting her name down for schools, and it’s not like the rest of us knew anything about that.”

“Like my lot,” Richie said, nodding. “Baby shite and curtains.”

“Yeah. At first they could get a babysitter and come for a few pints, so at least we saw them, but once they moved out to Brianstown… I’m not sure they really wanted to come out, anyway. They were busy doing the family thing, and they wanted to do it right; they weren’t into getting pissed in pubs and falling home at three in the morning, not any more. They invited us around all the time, but the distance, and with everyone working long hours…”

“Nobody could make it. Been there. When was the last time they invited you, do you remember?”

“Months ago. May, June. After all the times I couldn’t make it, Jenny kind of gave up.” Fiona’s hands were starting to clench around her mug. “I should’ve made more of an effort.”

Richie shook his head easily. “No reason why you should’ve. You were doing your thing, they were doing theirs, everyone was well and happy-they were happy, yeah?”

“Yeah. I mean, the last few months they were worried about money, but they knew they’d be OK in the end. Jenny said it to me a couple of times, that she wasn’t going to let herself get all hyper because she knew they’d come out all right somehow or other.”

“And you figured she was right?”

“I actually did, yeah. That’s what Jenny’s like: things do work out for her. Some people, they’re just good at life. They do it right, without even thinking about it. Jenny always had the knack.”

For a flash I saw Geri in her savory-smelling kitchen, examining Colm’s homework and laughing at Phil’s joke and keeping an eye on the ball that Andrea was batting around; and then Dina, wild-haired and claw-fingered, fighting me for no reason she could ever have named. I managed not to look at my watch. “I know what you mean,” I said. “I would have envied that. Did you?”

Fiona thought about that, wrapping hair around her finger. “When we were younger, maybe. Probably. You know when you’re teenagers, no one has a clue what they’re at? Jenny and Pat always knew what they were doing. Probably that was one of the reasons I went out with Conor-I was hoping if I did the same stuff Jenny did, I’d be like that. Certain about stuff. I would’ve liked that.” She unspiraled the lock of hair and examined it, twisting it to catch and lose the light. Her nails were bitten down to the quick. “But once we grew up… no. I didn’t want Jenny’s life: working in PR, getting married that early, having kids straightaway-none of that. Sometimes I kind of wished I wanted it, though. It would’ve made life a lot simpler. Does that make sense?”

“Absolutely,” I said. Actually it sounded like some teenager’s whine, I wish I could do things the normal way but I’m just too special, but I kept the zap of irritation to myself. “What about the designer gear, though? The expensive holidays? That must have stung, watching Jenny enjoy all that while you were stuck sharing a flat and counting your pennies.”

She shook her head. “I’d only look stupid in designer clothes. I’m not that into money.”

“Come on, Ms. Rafferty. Everyone wants money. That’s nothing to be ashamed of.”

“Well, I don’t want to be broke. But it’s not the most important thing in my entire universe. What I want is to be a really good photographer-like good enough that I wouldn’t have to try and explain to you about Pat and Jenny, or about Pat and Conor; I could just show you my photos, and you’d see. If that takes a few years of working at Pierre’s for crap money while I learn, then OK, fair enough. My flat’s nice, my car works, I go out every weekend. Why would I want more money?”

Richie said, “That’s not how the rest of the gang thought, but.”

“Conor did, kind of. He doesn’t care that much about money either. He does web design, and he’s really into it-he says in a hundred years’ time it’ll be one of the great art forms-so he’d do stuff for free, if it was something that got him interested. But the others… no. They never got it. They thought-I think even Jenny thought-I was just being immature, and sooner or later I’d get a grip.”

I said, “That must have been infuriating. Your oldest friends, your own sister, and they thought everything you wanted was worthless.”

Fiona exhaled and pushed her fingers through her hair, trying to find the right words. “Not really. I mean, I’ve got plenty of friends who do get it. The old gang… yeah, I wished we were on the same wavelength, but I didn’t blame them. Everything in the papers, in magazines, on the news… it was like you were a moron, or a freak, if you just wanted to be comfortable and do stuff you love. You weren’t supposed to be thinking about that; you were only supposed to be thinking about getting rich and buying property. I couldn’t really get all pissed off with the others for doing exactly what they were supposed to do.”

She ran her hand over the album. “That’s why we drifted. Not the age gap. Pat and Jenny and Ian and Mac and Shona, they were all doing the things you’re supposed to do. In different ways, so they drifted apart too, but they all wanted what we’re supposed to want. Conor and me, we wanted something else. The others couldn’t understand that. And we didn’t understand them, not really. And that was the end of that.”

She had turned the pages back to that shot of the seven of them on the wall. There was no bitchiness in her voice, just a kind of sad, bewildered wonder at how strange life could be, and how final. I said, “Pat and Conor obviously managed to stay close, though, didn’t they? If Pat picked Conor to be Emma’s godfather. Or was that Jenny’s call?”

“No! That was Pat. I told you, they were best friends. Conor was Pat’s best man. They stayed close.”

Right up until something changed, and they hadn’t been close any more. “Was he a good godfather?”

“Yeah. He was great.” Fiona smiled, down at the gangly boy in the photo. The thought of telling her made me wince. “We used to bring the kids to the zoo together, him and me, and he’d tell Emma stories about the animals having mad adventures after the zoo got locked up for the night… One time she lost her teddy, the one she had in bed at night? She was devastated. Conor told her the teddy had won a round-the-world trip, and he got all these postcards of places like Surinam and Mauritius and Alaska, I don’t even know where he got them-I guess online-and he cut out photos of a teddy like hers and stuck them on the cards, and wrote messages from the teddy, like, ‘Today I went skiing on this mountain and then drank hot chocolate, I’m sending you a big hug, love, Benjy,’ and he’d post them to Emma. Every single day, till she got all into this new doll and she wasn’t upset about the bear any more, she got one of those cards.”

“When was that?”

“Like three years ago? Jack was only a baby, so…”

That ripple of pain darted across Fiona’s face again. Before she could start thinking, I asked, “When was the last time you saw Conor?”

There was a sudden wary flicker in her eyes. The safe shell of concentration was starting to thin; she knew something was up, even if she couldn’t tell what. She sat back in her chair and wrapped her arms around her waist. “I’m not sure. It’s been a while. A couple of years, I guess.”

“He wasn’t at Emma’s birthday party, this April?”

The tension in her shoulders went up a notch. “No.”

“Why not?”

“I guess he couldn’t make it.”

I said, “You’ve just told us Conor was willing to go to a lot of trouble for his goddaughter. Why wouldn’t he bother with her birthday party?”

Fiona shrugged. “Ask him. I don’t know.”

She was picking at the sleeve of her jumper again and not looking at either of us. I leaned back, got comfortable and waited.

It took a few minutes. Fiona glanced at her watch and ripped at fragments of fluff, until she realized that we could wait longer than she could. Finally she said, “I think they could have maybe had some kind of argument.”

I nodded. “An argument about what?”

An uncomfortable shrug. “When Jenny and Pat bought the house, Conor thought they were nuts. I did too, but they didn’t want to hear that, so I tried a couple of times and then I kept my mouth shut. I mean, even if I wasn’t sure it would work out, they were happy, so I wanted to be happy for them.”

“But Conor didn’t. Why not?”

“He’s not great at keeping his mouth shut and just nodding and smiling, even when that’s the best thing he could do. He thinks it’s hypocritical. If he thinks something’s a crap idea, he’ll say it’s a crap idea.”

“And that annoyed Pat, or Jenny? Or both of them?”

“Both. They were like, ‘How else are we supposed to get on the property ladder? How else are we supposed to buy a decent-sized house with a garden for the kids? It’s a brilliant investment, in a few years it’ll be worth enough that we can sell it and buy somewhere in Dublin, but for now… If we were millionaires, yeah, we’d get a great big place in Monkstown straight off, but we’re not, so unless Conor wants to lend us a few hundred grand, this is what we’re getting.’ They were really pissed off that he wasn’t supportive. Jenny kept saying, ‘I don’t want to listen to all that negativity, if everyone thought that way then the country would be in ruins, we want to be around positivity…’ She was genuinely upset. Jenny’s a big believer in positive mental attitude; she felt like Conor would wreck everything if they kept listening to him. I don’t know the details, but I think in the end there was some kind of big blowup. After that Conor wasn’t around, and they didn’t mention him. Why? Does it matter?”

I asked, “Did Conor still have feelings for Jenny?”

It was the million-dollar question, but Fiona just gave me a look like I hadn’t heard a word she had said. “That was forever ago. It was kid stuff, for God’s sake.”

“Kid stuff can be pretty powerful. There are plenty of people out there who never forget their first loves. Do you think Conor was one of them?”

“I don’t have a clue. You’d have to ask him.”

“What about you?” I asked. “Do you still have feelings for him?”

I had expected her to snap at me on that one, but she thought about it, her head bent over his face in the album, her fingers tangling in her hair again. “It depends what you mean by feelings,” she said. “I miss him, yeah. Sometimes I think about him. We’d been friends since I was, like, eleven. That’s important. But it’s not like I get all wistful and pine for the one who got away. I don’t want to get back together with him. If that’s what you wanted to know.”

“It didn’t occur to you to stay in touch after he had the blowup with Pat and Jenny? It sounds like you had more in common with him than they did, after all.”

“I thought about it, yeah. I left it a while, in case Conor needed to simmer down-I didn’t want to get in the middle of anything-but then I rang him a couple of times. He didn’t get back to me, so I didn’t push it. Like I said, he wasn’t the center of my world or anything. I figured, same as with Mac and Ian, we’d find each other again, somewhere down the line.”

This wasn’t where or how she had pictured the reunion. “Thanks,” I said. “That could be helpful.”

I reached to take the album, but Fiona’s hand came out to stop me. “Can I just-for a second…?”

I moved back and left her to it. She pulled the album closer, circled it with her forearms. The room was still; I could hear the faint hiss of the central heating moving through the walls.

“That summer,” Fiona said, barely to us. Her head was bent over the photo, hair tumbling. “We laughed so much. The ice cream… There was this little ice-cream kiosk, down near the beach-our parents used to go there when they were kids. That summer the landlord said he was raising the rent to something astronomical, there was no way the guy could pay it-the landlord wanted to force him out, so he could sell the land for, I don’t know, offices or apartments or something. Everyone around was outraged-the place was like an institution, you know? Kids got their first ice cream there, you went on first dates there… Pat and Conor, they said, ‘There’s only one way to keep him in business: we’ll see how much ice cream we can get into us.’ We ate ice cream every single day, that summer. It was like a mission. We’d only be finished one lot, and Pat and Conor would disappear and they’d come back with another big handful of cones, and we’d all be screaming at them to get those away from us; they’d be cracking up laughing, telling us, ‘Go on, you have to do it, it’s for the cause, rage against the machine…’ Jenny kept saying she was going to turn into a great big lump of lard and then Pat would be sorry, but she ate them anyway. We all did.”

Her fingertip brushed across the photo, lingering on Pat’s shoulder, Jenny’s hair, coming to rest on Conor’s T-shirt. She said, on a sad whisper of a laugh, “‘I go to JoJo’s.’”

For a second Richie and I didn’t breathe. Then Richie said, easily, “JoJo’s was the ice-cream shop, yeah?”

“Yeah. He gave out these little badges, that summer, so you could show you supported him. ‘I go to JoJo’s,’ and a picture of an ice cream cone. Half of Monkstown was wearing them-old women and everything. We saw a priest with one once.” Her finger shifted, moving off a pale spot on Conor’s T-shirt. It was small and blurry enough that we hadn’t looked at it twice. Each bright T-shirt and top had one somewhere, the chest, the collar, the sleeve.

I bent to fish in the cardboard box, pulled out the little evidence bag that held the rusted pin we had found hidden in Jenny’s drawer. I passed it across the table. “Is this one of the badges?”

Fiona said softly, “Oh my God. God, look at that…” She tilted the badge to the light, searching for the image through the wear and the print dust that had turned up nothing. “Yeah, it is. Is this Pat’s or Jenny’s?”

“We don’t know. Which of them would have been more likely to keep it?”

“I’m not sure. I would’ve said neither of them, actually. Jenny doesn’t like clutter, and Pat doesn’t really get sentimental like that. He’s more practical. He’ll do stuff, like the ice creams, but he wouldn’t keep the badge just for the sake of it. Maybe he could’ve forgotten it in with a bunch of other things… Where was it?”

“In the house,” I said. I reached out a hand for the bag, but Fiona held on to it, fingers pressed on the badge through the thick plastic.

“What… why do you need it? Does it have something to do with…?”

I said, “In the early stages, we have to go on the assumption that anything could be relevant.”

Richie asked, before she could press harder, “Did the campaign work? Yous got the landlord off JoJo’s back?”

Fiona shook her head. “God, no. He lived in Howth or somewhere; he didn’t care if the whole of Monkstown was sticking pins in his voodoo doll. And even if we’d all eaten ice cream till we dropped dead of heart attacks, JoJo wouldn’t have been able to pay what the guy was looking for. I think we sort of knew that all along, that he was going to lose. We just wanted…” She turned the bag in her hands. “That was the summer before Pat and Jenny and Conor were going to college. We knew that, too, deep down: that everything was going to start changing when they went. I think Pat and Conor started the whole thing because they wanted to make that summer special. It was the last one. I think they wanted us all to have something good to look back on. Silly stories to tell, years down the line. Stuff so we could say, ‘Do you remember…?’”

She would never say it about that summer again. I asked, “Do you still have your JoJo’s badge?”

“I don’t know. Maybe somewhere. I’ve got a bunch of stuff in boxes in my mum’s attic-I hate throwing stuff away. I haven’t seen it in years, though. Forever.” She smoothed the plastic over the badge for a moment, then held it out to me. “When you’re done with it, if Jenny doesn’t want it, could I have it?”

“I’m sure we can work something out.”

“Thanks,” Fiona said. “I’d like that.” She took a breath, pulling herself out of someplace wrapped in warm sunlight and helpless laughter, and checked her watch. “I should go. Is that…? Was there anything else?”

Richie’s eyes met mine, with a question in them.

We would need to talk to Fiona again: we needed Richie to stay the good guy, the safe one who didn’t hit her on every bruise. “Ms. Rafferty,” I said quietly, leaning forward on my elbows, “there’s something I need to tell you.”

She froze. The look in her eyes was terrible: Oh God, not more. “The man we’ve got under arrest,” I said. “It’s Conor Brennan.”

Fiona stared. When she could, she said, panting for breath, “No. Hang on. Conor? What… Under arrest for what?”

“We’ve arrested him for the attack on your sister and the murders of her family.”

Fiona’s hands jumped; for a second I thought she was going to slap them over her ears, but she pressed them on the table again. She said, flat and hard as a brick slamming down on stone, “No. Conor didn’t.”

She was as certain as she had been about Pat. She needed to be. If either of them had done this, then her past as well as her present was a mauled, bleeding ruin. All that bright landscape of ice creams and in-jokes, screams of laughter on a wall, her first dance and her first drink and her first kiss: nuked, humming with radioactivity, untouchable.

I said, “He’s made a full confession.”

“I don’t care. You- What the fuck? Why didn’t you tell me? You just let me sit here talking about him, let me yap away and hoped I’d say something that would make things worse for him- That’s shit. If Conor actually confessed, then it’s only because you messed with his head the way you’ve been messing with mine. He didn’t do this. This is insane.”

Good middle-class girls don’t talk to detectives that way, but Fiona was too furiously intent for caution. Her hands were fisted on the table and her face looked bleached and friable, like a shell dried out on sand. She made me want to do something, anything, the stupider the better: take it all back, push her out the door, spin her chair to the wall so I wouldn’t have to see her eyes. “It’s not just the confession,” I said. “We have evidence backing it up. I’m so sorry.”

“What kind of evidence?”

“I’m afraid we can’t go into that. But we’re not talking about little coincidences that can be explained away. We’re talking about solid, unarguable, incriminating evidence. Proof.”

Fiona’s face shut down. I could see her mind speeding. “Right,” she said, after a minute. She pushed her mug away on the table and got up. “I have to get back to Jenny.”

I said, “Until Mr. Brennan is charged, we won’t be releasing his name to the press. We’d prefer that you don’t mention it to anyone, either. That includes your sister.”

“I wasn’t planning to.” She pulled her coat off the back of her chair and swung it on. “How do I get out of here?”

I opened the door for her. “We’ll be in touch,” I said, but Fiona didn’t look up. She headed down the corridor fast, with her chin tucked into her collar like she was already shielding herself against the cold.