Broken Harbour

16

Before we had Conor brought over to us, we skimmed through everything the tide had washed up in the squad room: reports, phone messages, statements, tips, the lot. Most of it was a whole lot of nothing-the floaters looking for Conor’s friends and family had turned up no one but a couple of cousins, the tip line had attracted the usual swarm of freaks who wanted to talk about the Book of Revelations and complicated maths and immodest women-but there were a couple of gems in there. Fiona’s old pal Shona was in Dubai this week and would sue us all personally if anyone printed her name in connection with this mess, but she did share her opinion that Conor had been mad about Jenny when they were kids and that nothing had changed since, otherwise why had he never had a relationship longer than six months? And Larry’s boys had found a rolled-up overcoat, a jumper, a pair of jeans, a pair of leather gloves and a pair of runners, size ten, shoved in the bin of an apartment block a mile from Conor’s flat. They were all covered in blood. The blood types matched Pat and Jenny Spain. The left runner was consistent with the print in Conor’s car, and a perfect match to the one on the Spains’ kitchen floor.

We waited in the interview room, one of the tiny cramped ones with no observation room and barely enough space to move, for the uniforms to bring Conor up. Someone had been using it: there were sandwich wrappers and foam cups scattered on the table, a faint smell of citrus aftershave and sweat and onion in the air. I couldn’t stay still. I moved around the room, balling up rubbish and tossing it into the bin.

Richie said, “He should be well nervous by now. A day and a half sitting in there, wondering what we’re waiting for…”

I said, “We need to be very clear on what we’re after. I want a motive.”

Richie stuffed empty sugar sachets into a foam cup. “We might not get one.”

“Yeah. I know.” Saying it hit me with another wave of that lightheadedness; for a second I thought I would have to lean on the table till my balance steadied. “There might not be one. You were right: sometimes shit just happens. But that’s not going to stop me giving it my best shot.”

Richie thought about that, examining a plastic wrapper he had picked off the floor. “If we might not get a motive,” he said. “What else are we after?”

“Answers. What Conor and the Spains fought about, a few years back. His relationship with Jenny. Why he wiped that computer.” The room was as clean as it was going to get. I made myself lean against the wall and stay put. “I want us to be sure. When you and I leave this room, I want both of us on the same page and both of us sure who we’re chasing. That’s all. If we can just get that far, the rest will fall into place.”

Richie watched me. His face was unreadable. He said, “I thought you were sure.”

My eyes were gritty with fatigue. I wished I had got an extra coffee, when we stopped for lunch. I said, “I was.”

He nodded. He tossed the cup into the bin and came to lean against the wall next to me. After a while he dug a packet of mints out of his pocket and held it out. I took one and we stayed there, sucking mints, shoulder to shoulder, until the interview-room door opened and the uniform brought Conor in.

He looked bad. Maybe it was just because he wasn’t wearing the duffle coat this time, but he seemed even thinner, thin enough that I wondered if we should get him checked out by a doctor, bones jutting painfully through the reddish stubble. He had been crying again.

He sat hunched over the table, staring at his fists planted in front of him, not moving even when the central heating kicked on with a clang. In a way, that reassured me. The innocent ones fidget and jitter and almost leap out of their seats at the slightest noise; they’re itching to talk to you and get the whole thing straightened out. The guilty ones are concentrating, marshaling all their forces tight around the inner stronghold and bracing themselves for battle.

Richie stretched up to switch on the video camera and told it, “Detective Kennedy and Detective Curran interviewing Conor Brennan. Interview commenced at four forty-three P.M.” I ran through the rights sheet; Conor signed without looking, sat back and folded his arms. As far as he was concerned, we were done.

“Oh, Conor,” I said, leaning back in my chair and shaking my head sadly. “Conor, Conor, Conor. And here I thought we were getting on so well, the other night.”

He watched me and kept his mouth shut.

“You weren’t being honest with us, fella.”

That sent a zip of fear across his face, too sharp to hide. “I was.”

“No you weren’t. Ever heard of the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth? You let us down on at least one of those. Now why would you go and do that?”

Conor said, “Don’t know what you’re talking about.” His mouth clamped shut in a hard line, but his eyes were still fixed on me. He was afraid.

Richie, lounging against the wall under the camera, clicked his tongue reproachfully. I said, “Let’s start with this: you gave us the impression that, up until Monday night, the closest you’d got to the Spains was through binoculars. You didn’t think it might be an idea to mention that you’d been best buddies since you were kids?”

A faint red sprang up on his cheekbones, but he didn’t blink: this wasn’t what he was afraid of. “None of your business.”

I sighed and wagged a finger at him. “Conor, you know better than that. You name it, it’s our business now.”

“And how much difference did it make?” Richie pointed out. “You had to know Pat and Jenny had photos, man. All you did was set us back a couple of hours and piss us off.”

“My colleague speaks the truth,” I said. “Can you remember that, next time you’re tempted to dick us around?”

Conor said, “How’s Jenny?”

I snorted. “What’s it to you? If you were so concerned about her health, you could have just, I don’t know, not stabbed the poor woman. Or are you hoping she’s finished the job for you?”

His jaw had tightened, but he held on to his cool. “I want to know how she’s doing.”

“And I don’t care what you want. Tell you what, though: we’ve got a few questions for you. If you answer them all like a nice boy, without any more messing, then maybe I’ll be in a better mood and I’ll feel like sharing. Does that sound fair enough?”

“What do you want to know?”

“Let’s start with the easy stuff. Tell us about Pat and Jenny, back when you were all kiddies together. What was Pat like?”

Conor said, “He was my best mate, since we were fourteen. You probably know that already.” Neither of us answered. “He was sound. That’s all. The soundest bloke I’ve ever known. Liked rugby, liked having a laugh, liked hanging out with his mates; he liked most people, everyone liked him. A lot of popular blokes are wankers, when you’re that age, but I never saw Pat be a bastard to anyone. Maybe all that doesn’t sound like anything special to you. But it is.”

Richie was tossing a sugar sachet in the air and catching it. “You were close, yeah?”

Conor’s chin pointed from Richie to me. “You’re partners. That means you’ve got to be ready to trust each other with your lives, right?”

Richie caught his sachet and stayed still, letting me answer. I said, “Good partners do. Yeah.”

“Then you know what Pat and me were like. There’s some stuff I told him, I think I might’ve done myself in if anyone else had found out. I told him anyway.”

He had missed the irony, if it was there. The flash of unease almost sent me out of my chair and circling the room again. “What kind of stuff?”

“You must be joking. Family stuff.”

I glanced across at Richie-we could find out somewhere else, if we needed to-but his eyes were on Conor. I said, “Let’s talk about Jenny. What was she like, back then?”

Conor’s face softened. “Jenny,” he said gently. “She was something special.”

“Yeah, we’ve seen the photos. No awkward phase going on there.”

“That’s not what I mean. She came into a room and made things better. She always wanted everything lovely, everyone happy, and she always knew the right thing to do. She had this touch, I’ve never seen anything like it. Like once we were all at a disco, one of those underage things, and Mac-this guy we used to hang out with-he was hovering around some girl, kind of dancing around her and trying to get her to dance with him. And she made this face at him and said something, I don’t know what, but her and her mates all collapsed laughing. Mac came back to us scarlet. Devastated. The girls were still pointing and giggling; you could tell he just wanted to disappear. And Jenny turns around to Mac and holds out her hands and says, ‘I love this song, only Pat hates it. Would you dance with me? Please?’ And off they go, and next thing you know Mac’s smiling, Jenny’s laughing at something he said, they’re having a ball. That shut the girls up. Jenny was ten times prettier than your woman, any day.”

I said, “That didn’t bother Pat?”

“Jenny dancing with Mac?” He almost laughed. “Nah. Mac was a year younger. Fat kid with bad hair. And anyway, Pat knew what Jenny was doing. I’d say he just loved her more for doing it.”

That softness had seeped into his voice. It sounded like a lover’s, a voice for low light and drifting music, for only one listener. Fiona and Shona had been right.

I said, “Sounds like a good relationship.”

Conor said simply, “They were beautiful. Only word for it. You know when you’re a teenager, a lot of the time it feels like the whole world is shite? The two of them’d give you hope.”

“That’s lovely,” I said. “Really, it is.”

Richie had started playing with the sugar sachet again. “You went out with Jenny’s sister Fiona, yeah? When you were, what, eighteen?”

“Yeah. For a few months, only.”

“Why’d you break up?”

Conor shrugged. “It wasn’t working out.”

“Why not? She was a geebag? You had nothing in common? She wouldn’t do the do?”

“No. She was the one that broke it off. Fiona’s great. We got on great. It just wasn’t working out.”

“Yeah, well,” Richie said dryly, catching the sugar, “I can see where it wouldn’t. If you were in love with her sister.”

Conor went still. “Who said that?”

“Who cares?”

“I care. Because they’re full of shite.”

“Conor,” I said, warning. “Remember our deal?”

He looked like he wanted to kick both of our teeth in, but after a moment he said, “It wasn’t the way you make it sound.”

And if that wasn’t a motive then at least, at the very least, it was only one step away. I couldn’t stop myself from glancing over at Richie, but he had thrown the sugar too far and was lunging for it. “Yeah?” he wanted to know. “How do I make it sound?”

“Like I was some dirtbag trying to get between the two of them. I wasn’t. If I could’ve pushed a button and split them up, I would never have done it. Anything else, what I felt: that was my business.”

“Maybe,” I said. I was pleased with the sound of my voice, lazy, amused. “Up until Jenny found out, anyway. She did find out, didn’t she?”

Conor had reddened. After all these years, this should have healed over. “I never said a word to her.”

“You didn’t need to. Jenny guessed. Women do, old son. How did she feel about it?”

“Wouldn’t know.”

“Did she give you the old brush-off? Or did she enjoy the attention, lead you on? Ever have a little kiss and a cuddle, when Pat wasn’t looking?”

Conor’s fists were clenched on the table. “No. I told you, Pat was my best mate. I told you what the two of them were like together. You think either of us, me or Jenny, would ever have done that?”

I laughed out loud. “Oh, God, yeah. I’ve been a teenage bloke myself. I’d have sold my own mother downriver for a bit of tit.”

“Probably you would’ve. I wouldn’t.”

“Very honorable of you,” I said, with only a flicker of a smirk. “But Pat didn’t understand that you were just worshipping nobly from afar, did he? He confronted you about Jenny. You want to tell us your version of what went down?”

Conor demanded, “What do you want? I’ve told you I killed them. All this, back when we were kids, this had nothing to do with it.”

His knuckles were white. I said coolly, “Remember what I told you? We like deciding for ourselves what’s relevant. So let’s hear what went down between you and Pat.”

His jaw moved, but he kept control. “Nothing went down. I’m at home one afternoon, a few days after Fiona broke up with me, and Pat calls round and says, ‘Let’s go for a walk.’ I knew something was up-he had this grim face on him, wouldn’t look at me. We went walking down the beach, and he asked me if Fiona dumped me because I was into Jenny.”

“Man,” said Richie, making a cringe face. “Awkward.”

“You think? He was really upset. So was I.”

I said, “Restrained kind of guy, Pat, wasn’t he? Me, I’d have knocked your teeth out.”

“I thought probably he would. I was OK with that. Figured I deserved it. But Pat-he wasn’t the type to lose his temper, ever. He just went, ‘I know loads of guys fancy her. I don’t blame them. Not a problem, as long as they keep their distance. But you… Jesus, man, I never even thought of worrying about you.’”

“And what did you tell him?”

“Same as I told you. That I’d die before I’d get between them. That I’d never let Jenny know. That all I wanted was to find some other girl, be like the two of them, forget I’d ever felt this way.”

The shadow of old passion in his voice said he had meant every word, for whatever that was worth. I raised an eyebrow. “And that was all it took? Seriously?”

“It took hours. Walking up and down that beach, talking. But that’s the bones of it.”

“And Pat believed you?”

“He knew me. I was telling the truth. He believed me.”

“And then?”

“Then we went to the pub. Got locked, ended up staggering home holding each other up. Saying all the shite that guys say on nights like that.”

I love you, man, not in a gay way, but I love you, you know that, I’d do anything for you, anything… That unease flared through me, fiercer this time. I said, “And everything in the garden was rosy again.”

Conor said, “Yeah. It bloody was. I was Pat’s best man, a few years later. I’m Emma’s godfather. Check the paperwork, if you don’t believe me. You think Pat would’ve picked me if he’d thought I was trying to be with his wife?”

“People do strange things, fella. If they didn’t, me and my partner here would be out of a job. But I’ll take your word for it: best buds again, brothers in arms, all that good stuff. And then, a few years ago, the friendship went tits-up. We’d like to hear your version of what happened there.”

“Who said it went tits-up?”

I grinned at him. “You’re getting predictable, fella. A: we ask the questions. B: we don’t reveal our sources. And C: you said, among other people. If you’d still been all matey with the Spains, you wouldn’t have needed to freeze your balls off on a building site to see how they were doing.”

After a moment Conor said, “It was that fucking place. Ocean View. I wish to Jesus they’d never heard of it.”

His voice had a new, savage undercurrent to it. “I knew straightaway. Right from the off. Maybe three years ago, not long after Jack was born, I went over to Pat and Jenny’s place for dinner one night-they were renting this little town house in Inchicore, back then; I was ten minutes down the road, I was over all the time. I get there, and the two of them, they’re over the moon. I’m barely in the door, they shove this brochure of houses at me: ‘Look! Look at this! We put down our deposit this morning, Jenny’s mum minded the kids so we could camp outside the estate agent’s overnight, we were tenth in the queue, we got the exact one we wanted!’ They’d been dying to buy somewhere ever since they got engaged, so I was all ready to be delighted for them, yeah? But then I look at the brochure and the estate’s in Brianstown. Never heard of it; sounds like one of those nowhere dives that the developer’s named after his kid or himself, playing little emperor. And it says something like ‘Just forty minutes from Dublin,’ only I take one look at the map and that’s if you’ve got a helicopter.”

I said, “Long way from Inchicore. No more calling round for dinner every few days.”

“That wasn’t a problem. They could’ve found somewhere in Galway and I’d’ve been happy for them, as long as it was going to make them happy.”

“Which they thought this place was.”

“There was no place. I look closer at this brochure, and those aren’t houses; they’re models. I say, ‘Is the estate even built?’ and Pat goes, ‘It will be when we move in.’”

Conor shook his head, a corner of his mouth twisting. Something had changed. Broken Harbor had slammed into this conversation like a battering gust of wind, turning all of us tense and intent. Richie had put the sugar sachet away. “Betting years of their lives on a field in the middle of nowhere.”

I said, “So they were optimists. That’s a good thing.”

“Yeah? There’s optimistic, and then there’s plain crazy.”

“You didn’t think they were old enough to make that decision for themselves?”

“Yeah. I did. So I kept my gob shut. Said congratulations, I’m delighted for you, can’t wait to see the place. Nodded and smiled whenever they talked about it, when Jenny showed me bits of curtain material, when Emma drew a picture of what her room was going to look like. I wanted it to be wonderful. I was praying it’d be everything they’d ever wanted.”

I said, “But it wasn’t.”

Conor said, “The two of them brought me down to see the place, when the house was ready. A Sunday: the day before they were signing the final contracts. Two years ago-bit more, because it was summer. It was hot, sticky-hot-cloudy, and the cloud pressing the air down on top of you. The place was…” A grim sound that could have been a laugh. “You’ve seen it. It was better then-the weeds hadn’t come up, and there was still loads of work going on, so at least it didn’t feel like a graveyard-but still: it wasn’t somewhere anyone would want to live. When we get out of the car, Jenny goes, ‘Look, you can see the sea! Isn’t it gorgeous?’ I go, ‘Yeah, great view,’ but it wasn’t. The water looked dirty, greasy; there should have been a breeze coming off of it, cool us down, but it was like the air had died. The house was pretty enough, if you like Stepford, but straight across the road was waste ground and a bulldozer. The whole place was fucking horrendous. Made me want to turn around and get out as fast as I could, drag Pat and Jenny with me.”

Richie said, “What about them? Were they happy enough?”

Conor shrugged. “Sounded like. Jenny goes, ‘They’ll be finished building across the road in just a couple of months’-didn’t look like that to me, but I kept my mouth shut. She goes, ‘It’s going to be so lovely. The mortgage people are giving us a hundred and ten percent, so we can furnish the place. I was thinking about a maritime theme for the kitchen, to go with the sea? Don’t you think a maritime theme would be nice?’

“I go, ‘Might be safer to take just the hundred percent, furnish as you go along.’ Jenny laughs-it sounded fake, but that could’ve been just the way the air flattened everything out-and she goes, ‘Oh, Conor, relax. We can afford it. So we won’t eat out as much; there’s nowhere nearby anyway. I want everything to be nice.’

“I go, ‘I’m just saying, it’d be safer. In case.’ Maybe I should’ve said nothing, but that place… It felt like a big dog watching you, starting to come closer, and you know right now is when you need to get the fuck out. Pat just laughs and goes, ‘Man, do you know how fast property prices are rising? We haven’t even moved in yet, and the gaff’s already worth more than we’re paying. Any time we decide to sell, we’ll come out with a profit.’”

I said, hearing the pompous note in my voice, “If they were crazy, then so was the rest of the country. Nobody saw the crash coming.”

Conor’s eyebrow flicked. “You think?”

“If anyone had, the country wouldn’t be in this mess.”

He shrugged. “I don’t have a clue about financial stuff. I’m just a web designer. But I knew nobody wanted thousands of houses out in the middle of nowhere. People only bought them because they got told that in five years’ time they could sell up for double what they’d paid, and move somewhere decent. Like I said, I’m just some idiot, but even I knew a pyramid scheme eventually runs out of suckers.”

“Well, look at Alan Greenspan here,” I said. Conor was starting to piss me off-because he had been right, and because Pat and Jenny had had every right to believe that he was wrong. “It’s easy to be right in hindsight, fella. It wouldn’t have killed you to be a little more positive for your friends.”

“You mean, give them a little more bullshit? They were getting plenty of that already. The banks, the developers, the government: Go on, buy, best investment of your lives-”

Richie balled up the sugar sachet and sank it in the bin with a sharp rustle. He said, “If I’d seen my best mates running towards that cliff, I’d’ve said something, too. Might not have stopped them, but it might’ve meant the fall came as less of a shock.”

The two of them were looking at me like they were the ones on the same side, like I was the outsider. Richie was only nudging Conor towards what the crash had done to Pat, but it grated just the same. I said, “Keep talking. What happened next?”

Conor’s jaw moved. The memory was winding him tighter and tighter. “Jenny-she always hated fights-Jenny goes, ‘You should see the size of the back garden! We’re thinking about getting a slide for the kids, and in the summer we’ll have barbecues-you can stay over afterwards, so you won’t have to worry about having a few cans-’ Only just then there’s this huge crash across the road, like a whole bale of slates falling off the top of the scaffolding, something like that. We all jump a mile. When our hearts start beating again, I say, ‘You’re positive about this. Yeah?’ Pat goes, ‘Yeah. We are. We’d better be: the deposit’s non-refundable.’”

Conor shook his head. “He’s trying to make it into a joke. I say, ‘Fuck the deposit. You can still change your minds.’ And Pat, he blows up at me. He yells, ‘Fuck’s sake! Can’t you just pretend to be happy for us?’ And that wasn’t Pat, not at all-like I said, he never lost his temper. So I knew he was having second thoughts, major ones. I go, ‘Do you actually want this gaff? Just tell me that.’

“He goes, ‘Yeah, I do. I always did. You know that. Just because you’re happy renting some bachelor pad for the rest of your life-’ I go, ‘No. Not a gaff. This gaff. Do you want it? Do you even like it? Or are you only buying it because you’re supposed to?’

“Pat goes, ‘So it’s not perfect. I bloody well knew that already. What the fuck do you want us to do? We’ve got kids. When you’ve got a family, you need a home. What’s your problem with that?’”

Conor ran a hand up his jaw, hard enough that it left a red streak. “We were yelling. Back where we grew up, there’d have been half a dozen old ones sticking their noses out the doors by now. Out there, nothing even moved. I go, ‘If you can’t buy something you actually want, then keep renting till you can.’ Pat goes, ‘Sweet Jesus, Conor, that’s not how it works! We need to get on the property ladder!’ I go, ‘Like this? By going a million miles into debt for some dive that might never be a decent place to live? What if the wind changes and you get stuck like that?’

“Jenny tucks her hand in my elbow and she goes, ‘Conor, it’s fine, honest to God it is. I know you’re just trying to look out for us or whatever, but you’re being totally old-fashioned. Everyone’s doing it these days. Everyone.’”

He laughed, a single dry scrape. “She said it like that meant something. Like that was the argument over, end of story. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing.”

Richie said quietly, “She was right. Our generation, how many of them were doing the exact same thing? Thousands, man. Thousands and thousands.”

“So? Who gives a fuck what everyone else does? They were buying a house, not a T-shirt. Not an investment. A home. If you let other people decide what you think about something like that, if you just follow along because it’s trendy, then who are you? When the flock changes direction tomorrow, what, you just throw away everything you think and start over, because other people said so? Then what are you, underneath? You’re nothing. You’re no one.”

That fury, dense and cold as stone. I thought of the kitchen, smashed and bloody. “Is that what you said to Jenny?”

“I couldn’t say anything. Pat-he must’ve seen it on my face-Pat goes, ‘It’s true, man. Ask anyone in the country: ninety-nine percent of them would say we’re doing the right thing.’”

That raw scrape of a laugh again. “Stood there with my mouth open, staring. I couldn’t… Pat was never like that. Never. Not when we were sixteen. Yeah, sometimes he’d have a smoke or a spliff just because everyone at the party was, but underneath he knew who he was. He’d never have done anything full-on brain-dead, got into a car where the driver was pissed or anything like that, just because someone tried to pressure him into it. And now here he was, a fucking grown man, bleating on about ‘Everyone else is doing it!’”

I said, “So what did you say?”

Conor shook his head. “There wasn’t anything to say. I knew that already. The two of them… I didn’t have a clue who they were, any more. They weren’t people I wanted anything to do with. I tried anyway-fucking eejit. I went, ‘What the fuck’s happened to you two?’

“Pat says, ‘We grew up. That’s what happened. This is what being an adult is like. You play by the rules.’

“I go, ‘No it’s fucking well not. If you’re an adult, you think for your fucking self. Are you insane? Are you a zombie? What are you?’

“We were squared up like we were about to beat the shite out of each other. I thought we were; I thought he was going to punch me, any second. But then Jenny grabs my elbow again and pulls me around, and she yells, ‘You shut up! Just shut up! You’re going to ruin the whole thing. I can’t stand it, all this negativity-I don’t want that anywhere near the kids, I don’t want it anywhere near us, I don’t want it! It’s sick. If everyone starts thinking like you, the whole country’s going to go down the toilet and then we will be in trouble. Then will you be happy?’”

Conor ran a hand over his mouth again; I saw him bite down on the flesh of his palm. “She was crying. I started to say something, I don’t even know what, but Jenny slapped her hands over her ears and walked off, fast, down the road. Pat looked at me like I was dirt. He said, ‘Thanks, man. That was great.’ And he went after her.”

I said, “And what did you do?”

“I walked away. Walked around that shit-hole estate for a couple of hours, looking for something that’d make me ring Pat and say Sorry, man, I was so wrong, this place is gonna be paradise. All I found was more shit hole. In the end I rang this other mate of mine and got him to pick me up. Didn’t hear from them again. Didn’t try to get in touch, either.”

“Hmm,” I said. I leaned back in my chair, tapping my pen off my teeth, and considered that. “I suppose I’ve heard of friendships breaking up over some weird stuff, all right. But property values? Seriously?”

“I turned out to be right, didn’t I?”

“Were you pleased about that?”

“No. I’d have loved to be wrong.”

“Because you cared about Pat. Not to mention Jenny. You cared about Jenny.”

“About all four of them.”

“Especially Jenny. No, hang on: I’m not done. I’m a simple guy, Conor. Ask my partner here, he’ll tell you: I always go for the simplest solution, and it usually turns out to be the right one. So I’m thinking you could have fought with the Spains over their choice of house and the size of their mortgage and what it meant about their worldview and whatever else you just said-I lost track of some of it, you can remind me later. But it’s a lot simpler, given the background, that you guys fought because you were still in love with Jenny Spain.”

“That never even came up. We hadn’t talked about it since that one time, after Fiona broke up with me.”

I said, “So you were still in love with her.”

After a moment Conor said, quietly and painfully, “I’ve never known anyone like her.”

“Which is why your girlfriends never last. Right?”

“I don’t throw years of my life into something I don’t want. No matter who tells me I should. I saw Pat and Jenny; I know what the real thing looks like. Why would I go after anything else?”

I said, “But you’re trying to tell me that’s not what the argument was about.”

A flash of narrow, disgusted gray eyes. “It wasn’t. You think I’d’ve let them guess, either of them?”

“They did before.”

“Because I was younger. I was shite at hiding stuff, back then.”

I laughed out loud. “Just one big open book, yeah? Looks like Pat and Jenny weren’t the only ones who changed when they grew up.”

“I got more sense. I got more control. I didn’t turn into a different person.”

I said, “Does that mean you’re still in love with Jenny?”

“I haven’t talked to her in years.”

Which was a whole different question, but both of them could wait. “Maybe not. But you’ve seen plenty of her, from your little hideout. How did that start, while we’re at it?”

I expected Conor to dodge around that, but he answered fast and easily, like he welcomed it: any subject was better than his feelings for Jenny Spain. “By accident, almost. Things weren’t going great, the end of last year. Work had dried up. It was the start of the crash-no one was saying it, not then, you were a traitor to the country if you noticed it, but I knew. Freelancers like me, we were the first ones that felt it. I was pretty much skint. Had to move out of my apartment, get a shite bedsit-you’ve probably seen it. Haven’t you?”

Neither of us answered-in his corner Richie was staying still and melting into the background, leaving me a clear shot. The corner of Conor’s mouth twisted. “Hope you liked it. You can see why I don’t hang out there if I can help it.”

“But you didn’t sound like you were wild about Ocean View, either. How’d you end up hanging out there?”

He shrugged. “I had time on my hands, I was down… I kept thinking about Pat and Jenny. They were who I’d always talked to, if anything was bad. I missed them. I just… I wanted to see how they were getting on. I just started wondering.”

I said, “Well, that much I can get. But your average Joe, if he wants to reconnect with old mates, he doesn’t set up camp outside their back window. He picks up the phone. Sorry if it’s a stupid question, old son, but that didn’t occur to you?”

“Didn’t know if they’d want to talk to me. Didn’t even know if we still had enough in common that we’d get on. I couldn’t have taken finding out that we didn’t.” For a second he sounded like a teenager, fragile and raw. “Yeah, I could’ve rung Fiona and asked after them, but I didn’t know how much they’d told her, didn’t want to put her in the middle… One weekend I just figured I’d head out to Brianstown, see if I could get a look at them, go home. That was all.”

“And you got your look.”

“Yeah. Went up into that house, where you found me. I was only thinking I might catch them coming out into the back garden or something, but the windows in that kitchen… I could see everything. The four of them at the table. Jenny putting an elastic in Emma’s hair so it wouldn’t get in her lunch. Pat telling some story. Jack laughing, food all over his face.”

I asked, “How long did you stay up there?”

“Maybe an hour. It was nice; the nicest thing I’d seen in I don’t know how long.” The memory smoothed the tension out of Conor’s voice, gentled it. “Peaceful. I went home peaceful.”

“So you came back for another fix.”

“Yeah. A couple of weeks later. Emma had her dolls out in the garden, making them take turns to do some dance, showing them how. Jenny was hanging out her washing. Jack was being an airplane.”

“And that was peaceful too. So you kept coming back.”

“Yeah. What else was I going to do all day? Sit in that bedsit, staring at the telly?”

I said, “Next thing you know, you’re all set up with a sleeping bag and a pair of binoculars.”

Conor said, “I know it sounds crazy. You don’t have to tell me.”

“It does. But so far, fella, it also sounds harmless. Where it goes into full-on psycho is where you start breaking into their gaff. Want to tell us your version of that part?”

He still didn’t think twice. Even breaking and entering was safer ground than Jenny. “I found the back door key, like I told you. I wasn’t planning on doing anything with it; I just liked having it. But one morning they were all out, I’d been there all night, I was damp, I was bloody freezing-that was before I got the decent sleeping bag. I thought, Why not, just for five minutes, just to warm up… But it was good, in there. It smelled like ironing, and tea and baking, and some kind of flowery thing. Everything was clean, sparkly. It’d been a long time since I’d been in a place like that. A home.”

“When was this?”

“Spring. I don’t remember the date.”

“And then you just kept coming back,” I said. “You’re not much good at resisting temptation, are you, old son?”

“I wasn’t doing any harm.”

“No? So what did you do in there?”

Shrug. Conor had his arms folded and his eyes cut away from us: he was getting embarrassed. “Nothing much. Had a cup of tea and a biscuit. Sometimes a sandwich.” Jenny’s vanishing ham slices. “Sometimes I’d…” That flush was rising on his cheeks. “I’d close the curtains in the sitting room, so the arsehole neighbors couldn’t see, and watch a bit of telly. Stuff like that.”

I said, “You were pretending you lived there.”

Conor didn’t answer.

“Ever go upstairs? Into the bedrooms?”

Silence again.

“Conor.”

“A couple of times.”

“What’d you do?”

“Just looked into Emma’s room, and Jack’s. Stood at the door, looked. I just wanted to be able to picture them.”

“And Pat and Jenny’s room? Did you go in there?”

“Yeah.”

“And?”

“Not what you’re thinking. I lay down in their bed-I took off my shoes first. Just for a minute. Closed my eyes. That’s all.”

He wasn’t looking at us. He was falling away into the memory; I could feel the sadness rising off him, like cold off ice. I said, sharply, “It didn’t occur to you that you could be scaring the living shite out of the Spains? Or was that a bonus?”

That brought him back. “I wasn’t scaring them. I always made sure I got out of there way before they were due back. Put everything back just like I found it: washed my cup, dried it, put it away. Cleaned the floor, if I’d tracked in dirt. The stuff I took was all tiny; no one’s going to miss a couple of elastic bands. No one would’ve known I’d been there.”

“Except that we did know,” I said. “Keep that in mind. Tell me something, Conor-and remember, no bullshitting. You were jealous as hell, weren’t you? Of the Spains. Of Pat.”

Conor shook his head, an impatient jerk like he was shaking off a fly. “No. You’re not getting it. Same as the stuff when we were eighteen: it wasn’t the way you mean.”

“Then what way was it?”

“I didn’t want anything bad to happen to them, ever. I just… I know I gave them shit about doing what everyone else did. But when I started watching them…”

A long breath. The heating had cut off again. Without its hum the room felt silent as a vacuum; the thin sounds of our breathing were sucked into that silence, dissolved away to nothing. “From the outside their life looked exactly like everyone else’s, something out of some nightmare clone film. But once you saw it from the inside, you saw… Like, Jenny used to put on the same idiot fake-tan shite that all the girls use, make herself look exactly like everyone else-but afterwards she’d bring the bottle into the kitchen, and her and the kids would get little paintbrushes and draw on their hands. Stars or smiley faces, or their initials-once she put tiger stripes all up Jack’s arms; he was over the moon, being a tiger all week. Or after the kids were in bed Jenny’d be tidying up their crap, her and every other housewife in the world, only sometimes Pat would come give her a hand and they’d end up playing with the toys-like they’d be having a fight with the stuffed toys, and laughing, and when they got tired they’d lie on the floor together and look out the window at the moon. From up there, you could see they were still them. Still who they were when we were sixteen.”

Conor’s arms had loosened; his hands were cupped on the table, palms upturned, and his lips had parted. He was watching some slow procession of images move past a lit window, faraway and untouchable, glowing richly as enamel and gold.

“Nights last longer, when you’re outside on your own. You get to thinking strange things. I could see other lights, in other houses across the estate. Sometimes I heard music-someone used to play old rock ’n’ roll, top volume; someone else had a flute, used to practice. I started thinking about all the other people living there. All those different lives. Even if they were all just cooking dinner, one guy could be making his kid’s favorite to cheer her up after a bad day at school, some couple could be celebrating finding out she was pregnant… Every one of them, making dinner out there, every one of them was thinking something all their own. Loving someone all their own. Every time I was up there, it hit me harder. That kind of life: it’s beautiful, after all.”

Conor caught another deep breath and laid his hands flat on the table, palms down. He said, “That’s all. Not jealous. Just… that.”

Richie said, from his corner, “The Spains’ lives didn’t stay beautiful, though. Not after Pat lost his job.”

“They were grand.”

The instant edge to Conor’s voice-straight to Pat’s defense-set that unease ricocheting around inside me again. Richie came off the wall and leaned his arse on the table, too close to Conor. “Last time we talked, you said it wrecked Pat’s head. What’d you mean by that, exactly?”

“Nothing. I know Pat. I knew he’d hate being out of work. That’s all.”

“Man, the poor bastard was in tatters. OK? You’re not giving away anything we don’t already know. So what’d you see? Him acting weird? Crying? Fighting with Jenny?”

“No.” A short, tight pause, as Conor weighed up what to give us. His arms were folded across his chest again. “At first he was fine. After a few months-like over the summer-he started staying up late, sleeping late. He didn’t go out as much. He used to go running every day, but that went out the window. Some days he didn’t bother getting dressed, or shaving.”

“Sounds like depression to me.”

“He was down. So? Do you blame him?”

Richie said, “But you still didn’t think about actually getting in touch, no? When things went bad for you, you wanted Pat and Jenny. You never thought they might want you, when things got tough?”

Conor said, “Yeah. I did. I thought about it a lot. Thought maybe I could help-head out with Pat for a couple of pints and a laugh, mind the kids while the two of them got some time together… But I couldn’t do it. It would’ve been like saying, Ha-ha, told you this would all go to shite. Would’ve made things worse, not better.”

“Jaysus, man. How much worse could he have got?”

“A lot. So he didn’t get enough exercise, big deal. That doesn’t mean he was falling apart.”

The defensive snap was still there. I said, “You can’t have been happy that Pat wasn’t going out. If he was home, no tea and sandwiches for you. Did you still get chances to spend time in the house, the last couple of months?”

He turned towards me fast, giving Richie his shoulder, like I was saving him. “Less. Maybe once a week, though, they’d all be out, like they’d all pick up Emma from school and then go to the shops. Pat wasn’t scared to go out the door-he just wanted to be in so he could keep an eye out for that mink or whatever. He didn’t have a phobia, nothing like that.”

I didn’t look at Richie, but I felt him freeze. Conor shouldn’t have known about Pat’s animal.

I said easily, before he could realize, “Did you ever see the animal?”

“Like I said. I wasn’t in the house much.”

“Sure you were. I’m not talking just the last couple of months; I’m talking about the whole time you were popping in and out. Did you see it? Hear it?”

Conor was starting to turn wary, even if he wasn’t sure why. “I heard scratching, a couple of times. Thought it was mice, maybe, or a bird that had got into the attic.”

“What about at night? That’s when the animal would have been doing its hunting or shagging or whatever it’s into, and you were right outside, with your little binoculars. Ever see a mink, on your travels? An otter? Even a rat?”

“There’s stuff living out there, yeah. I heard plenty of things moving around, at night. Some of them were big. No clue what they were, because I didn’t see any of them. It was dark.”

“That didn’t worry you? You’re out there in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by wildlife you can’t see, nothing to protect yourself with?”

Conor shrugged. “Animals don’t bother me.”

“Brave man,” I said approvingly.

Richie said-rubbing his head, confused, the bewildered newbie trying to get things straight-“Hang on a sec there. I’m after missing a bit. How’d you know Pat was looking out for this animal?”

Conor’s mouth opened for an instant; then he shut down, thinking fast. “What’s the big deal?” I demanded. “It’s not a complicated question. Any reason you don’t want to tell us?”

“No. I just don’t remember how I found out.”

Richie and I looked at each other and started to laugh. “Beautiful,” I said. “Honest to God, no matter how long I do this job, that one never gets old.” Conor’s jaw had hardened: he didn’t like being laughed at. “Sorry, fella. But you’ve got to understand, we see an awful lot of amnesia around here. Sometimes I worry that the government’s putting something in the water. Want to try again?”

His mind was revving. Richie said, with the grin still in his voice, “Ah, come on, man. What harm?”

Conor said, “Listened at the kitchen window, one night. Heard Pat and Jenny talking about it.”

No streetlighting, no outside lights in the Spains’ garden: once it got dark, he could have come over the wall and spent his evenings pressed against their windows, listening. Privacy should have been the least of the Spains’ problems, out among rubble and creeping vines and sea-sounds, miles of motorway from anyone who gave a damn about them. Instead, not one thing had been their own. Conor wandering through their house, pressing up against their late-night wine and cuddles; the Gogans’ greasy fingers pawing over their arguments, poking into the soft crevices of their marriage. The walls of their home had been tissue paper, ripping and melting to nothing.

“Interesting,” I said. “And how did the conversation sound to you?”

“What d’you mean?”

“Who said what? Were they worried? Upset? Arguing? Yelling and screaming? What?”

Conor’s face had gone blank. He hadn’t planned for this. “I didn’t hear all of it. Pat said something about a trap not working. And I guess Jenny said something about trying different bait, and Pat said if he could just get a look at the animal then he’d know what to use. They didn’t seem upset, nothing like that. Bit concerned, maybe, but so would anyone be. It definitely wasn’t an argument. It didn’t sound like a big deal.”

“Right. And when was this?”

“Don’t remember. Sometime this summer, probably. Could’ve been later.”

“Interesting stuff,” I said, shoving my chair back from the table. “Hold that thought, fella. We’re going outside to talk about you for a while. Interview suspended; Detectives Kennedy and Curran leaving the room.”

Conor said, “Wait. How’s Jenny? Is she…?” He couldn’t finish.

“Ah,” I said, swinging my jacket over my shoulder. “I was waiting for that. You did well, Conor old son: you hung in there a good long time before you just had to ask. I thought you’d be begging inside sixty seconds. I underestimated you.”

“I answered everything you asked.”

“You did, didn’t you? Give or take. Good boy.” I arched an inquiring eyebrow at Richie, who shrugged, sliding off the table. “Why not, I suppose. Jenny’s alive, chum. She’s out of danger. Another few days and she should be out of the hospital.”

I expected either relief or fear, maybe even anger. Instead he took that in with a quick hissing breath and a curt nod, and said nothing.

I said, “She’s given us some very interesting information.”

“What did she say?”

“Come on, fella. You know we can’t share that. Let’s just say, though, you’d want to be very careful about telling us any lies that Jenny Spain can contradict. You think about that, while we’re gone. Think good and hard.”

I caught a last look at Conor while I held the door open for Richie. He was staring at nothing and breathing through his teeth, and just like I had told him to, he was thinking hard.

In the corridor I said, “Did you hear that? There’s a motive in there somewhere. It’s there after all, thank Jesus. And I’m going to get at it, if I have to beat it out of that freak.”

My heart was hammering; I wanted to hug Richie, bang on the door to make Conor jump, I couldn’t tell what. Richie was running a fingernail back and forth across the battered green paint of the wall and watching the door. He said, “You figure, yeah?”

“I figure hell yeah. The second he made that slip about the animal, he started bullshitting us again. That conversation about traps and bait, that never happened. If there was a shouting match going on and Conor practically had his ear to the window, probably he could have heard a lot of it; but the Spains had double glazing, remember. Throw in the sound of the sea, and even from right up close, no way would he have been able to hear a normal conversation. Maybe he’s just lying about the tone-they were having a screaming row, and he doesn’t feel like telling us, for whatever reason. But if that’s not how he found out about the animal, then how?”

Richie said, “He found the computer up and running, one of the times he broke in. Had a read.”

“Could be. It makes more sense than this crap he’s feeding us. But why not say it straight out?”

“He doesn’t know we’ve recovered anything off the computer. Doesn’t want us knowing Pat was losing the plot, in case we cop on that he’s covering for Pat.”

“If he is. If. ” I had known Richie wasn’t on side yet, but hearing it out loud set me pacing tight circles in the corridor. Every muscle in me was twitching from making myself sit still at that table for so long. “Has it occurred to you how else he could have known?”

Richie said, “Him and Jenny were having an affair. Jenny told him about the animal.”

“Yes. Maybe. Could be. We’ll find out. But that’s not what I’ve got in mind. Losing the plot, you said: Pat was losing the plot. What if that was what Pat was supposed to think, too?”

Richie shoved himself back against the wall and tucked his hands in his pockets. He said, “Go on.”

I said, “Remember what that hunter guy on the internet said, the one who recommended the trap? He wanted to know if there was any chance Pat’s kids were messing about with it. Now, we know the kids were too little for that, but there’s someone else who wasn’t. Someone who had access.”

“You think Conor let the animal out of the trap? Took the bait mouse away?”

I couldn’t stop circling. I wished we had an observation room, somewhere I could move fast and not have to keep my voice down. “Maybe that. Maybe even more than that. Fact: to begin with, at least, Conor was fucking with Jenny’s head. Eating her food, nicking her bits and pieces-he can keep telling us till the cows come home that he didn’t want to scare her, but the fact is, that’s what he did: freaked the shit out of her. He had Fiona thinking Jenny was losing her mind; probably he had Jenny thinking the same thing. What if he did the same to Pat?”

“How, like?”

“Whatshisname, Dr. Dolittle, he said he couldn’t swear there had ever been an animal in that attic. You took that to mean that Pat Spain was imagining the whole thing. What if there never was an animal because it was all Conor’s doing?”

That sent something vivid shooting across Richie’s face: skepticism, defensiveness, I couldn’t tell what. I said, “Every sign Pat talked about, everything we’ve seen, could have been faked by anyone who had access to that house. You heard Dr. Dolittle, what he said about that robin: an animal’s teeth could have taken its head off, but so could a knife. Those gouges on the attic beam: could be claw marks, could be blade marks or nail marks. The skeletons: an animal isn’t the only thing that can strip a couple of squirrels to bones.”

“The noises?”

“Oh, yeah. Let’s not forget the noises. Remember what Pat posted, way back on the Wildwatcher board? There’s a space about eight inches deep between the attic floor and the ceiling below. How hard would it be to get a remote-controlled MP3 player and a good set of speakers, plant them in that space, and switch on a track of scratching and banging every time you see Pat going upstairs? Hide them behind bits of insulation, so that if he goes looking around the space with a torch-like he did-he’ll see nothing. It’s not like he’ll be looking for an electronic gadget, anyway; he’ll be looking for hairs, droppings, an animal, and no fear of him spotting any of those. If you want a little extra fun, then you switch off the track whenever Jenny’s around, so she starts to wonder if Pat’s going off his trolley. Swap the batteries every time you break in-or just find a way to run the system off the house electricity-and your little game can keep going for as long as it takes.”

Richie pointed out, “It didn’t stay in the attic, but. The animal-if there was an animal. It went down in the walls. Pat heard it in every room, just about.”

“He thought he did. Remember what else he posted? He couldn’t be sure where the animal was, because the acoustics in the house were strange. Say Conor’s shifting the speakers every now and then, just to keep Pat on his toes, make it sound like the animal’s moving around the attic. Then one day he realizes that, when he positions the speakers just right, the sound goes down through the wall cavities so it sounds like it’s coming from a downstairs room… Even the house played straight into Conor’s hands.”

Richie was biting a nail, thinking. “Long way from that hide to the attic. Would a remote control even work?”

I couldn’t slow down. “I’m sure you can get one that would. Or, if you can’t, then you come out of the hide. After dark, you sit in the Spains’ garden and push buttons; during the day, you work the remote from the attic next door, and you only play the track when you know Jenny’s going to be out or cooking. It’s a little less precise, since you can’t watch the Spains, but it’ll get the job done in the end.”

“Lot of hassle.”

“It would be, yeah. So was setting up that hide.”

“The Bureau lads didn’t find anything like that. No MP3 player, no speakers, nothing.”

“So Conor took his system away and bunged it in a bin somewhere. Before he killed the Spains-if it had been after, he’d have left blood smears. And that means the murders were planned. Carefully planned.”

“Nasty,” Richie said, almost absently. He was still chewing on that nail. “Why, but? Why invent an animal?”

I said, “Because he’s still mad about Jenny, and he figured she would be more likely to run off with him if Pat was losing his mind. Because he wanted to show them what morons they’d been to buy in Brianstown. Because he had nothing better to do.”

“Thing is, though: Conor cared about Pat, as well as Jenny. You said it yourself, right from the beginning. You think he’d try to drive Pat round the twist?”

“Caring about them didn’t stop him from killing them.” Richie’s eyes met mine for a second and flicked away, but he said nothing. I said, “You still don’t think he did that, either.”

“I think he loved them. All I’m saying.”

“‘Loved’ doesn’t mean the same thing to Conor as it does to you and me. You heard him in there: he wanted to be Pat Spain. He’s wanted that since they were teenagers. That’s why he threw a tantrum when Pat started making decisions he didn’t like: he felt like Pat’s life was his. Like he owned it.” As I passed the interview-room door I gave it a kick, harder than I meant to. “Last year, when Conor’s own life went to shit, he finally had to face it. The more he watched the Spains, the harder it hit home that, no matter how much he bitched about Stepford and zombies, that was what he wanted: the sweet kids, the nice home, the steady job, Jenny. Pat’s life.” The thought moved me faster and faster. “Up there in his own little world, Conor was Pat Spain. And when Pat’s life went arseways, Conor felt like he was being robbed of all that.”

“And that’s the motive? Revenge?”

“More complicated than that. Pat isn’t doing what Conor signed on for any more. Conor isn’t getting his transfusion of secondhand happy-ever-after, and he’s desperate for it. So he decides he’s going to step in and put things back on track. It’s up to him to fix things for Jenny and the kids. Maybe not for Pat, but that doesn’t matter. In Conor’s mind, Pat’s broken the contract: he’s not doing his job. He doesn’t deserve his perfect life any more. It should go to someone who’s going to make the most of it.”

“So, not revenge,” Richie said. His voice was neutral: he was listening, but he wasn’t convinced. “Salvage.”

“Salvage. Probably Conor’s got a whole elaborate fantasy about sweeping Jenny and the kids off to California, Australia, somewhere a web designer can get a good job and keep a lovely family in style and sunshine. But in order to step in, he needs to get Pat out of the way. He needs to break up that marriage. And I’ll give him this: he was clever about it. Pat and Jenny are already under pressure, the cracks are starting to show, so Conor uses what’s to hand: he steps up that pressure. He finds ways to make them both paranoid-about their home, about each other, about themselves. He’s got a knack, this guy. He takes his time over the job, he ratchets things up little step by little step, and before you know it, there’s no place left where Pat and Jenny feel safe. Not with each other, not in their own home, not in their own minds.”

I realized, with a kind of detached surprise, that my hands were shaking. I shoved them into my pockets. “He was clever, all right,” I said. “He was good.”

Richie took his nail out of his mouth. “I’ll tell you what’s bothering me,” he said. “What happened to the simplest solution?”

“What are you on about?”

“Stick with the answer that needs the fewest extras. That’s what you said. MP3 player, speakers, remote control; extra break-ins to move them around; a load of luck so Jenny never hears the noises… Man, that’s a lot of extras.”

I said, “It’s easier to assume that Pat was a fruitcake.”

“Not easier. Simpler. It’s simpler to assume that he was imagining the whole thing.”

“Is it? And the guy who was stalking them, wandering around their house eating their ham slices, at exactly the same time as Pat was turning from a sensible guy into a looper: that’s just a coincidence? A coincidence that size, my friend, that’s one hell of an extra.”

Richie was shaking his head. “The recession got to both of them; no big coincidence there. This thing with the MP3, though: that’d be a one-in-a-million shot, making sure Pat hears the noises and Jenny never does. You’re talking about day and night, for months; and that house, it’s not some massive mansion where people can be miles apart. No matter how careful you were, sooner or later she’d hear something.”

“Yeah,” I said. “You’re probably right.” I realized that I had stopped moving, what felt like a long time ago. “So maybe she did.”

“What d’you mean?”

“Maybe the two of them were in it together: Conor and Jenny. That makes everything a whole lot simpler, doesn’t it? No need for Conor to worry about keeping the noises away from Jenny: if Pat asks her, ‘Do you hear that?’ all she has to do is look blank and say, ‘Hear what?’ No need to worry if the kids hear, either: Jenny can convince them they’re just imagining things, and they shouldn’t talk about it in front of Daddy. And no need for Conor to break in and move equipment around: Jenny can look after all that.”

Under the white fluorescents, Richie’s face looked like it had in the stripped morning light outside the morgue: bleached white, eroded down to the bone. He didn’t like this.

I said, “That explains why she’s playing down Pat’s state of mind. It explains why she didn’t tell him, or the local uniforms, about the break-ins. It explains why Conor wiped the animal off the computer. It explains why he confessed: protecting his girlfriend. It explains why she’s not grassing him up: guilt. In fact, old son, I’d say it explains just about everything.” I could hear the pieces falling into place all around me, a small neat patter like soft raindrops. I wanted to lift my face to it, wash myself clean in it, drink it down.

Richie didn’t move and for a moment I knew he felt it too, but then he caught a quick breath and shook his head. “I don’t see it.”

“It’s clear as day. It’s beautiful. You don’t see it because you don’t want to see it.”

“It’s not that. How do you get from there to the murders? If Conor was aiming to send Pat mental, it was working great: the poor bastard’s head was melted. Why would Conor dump all his plans and kill him? And if Jenny and the kids are what he’s after, what’s he doing killing them too?”

I said, “Come on.” I was already striding down the corridor, as fast as I could go without breaking into a run. Richie had to trot to keep up. “Remember that JoJo’s badge?”

“Yeah.”

“The little fuck,” I said. I took the stairs down to the evidence room two at a time.

Conor was still in his chair, but there were red marks around one thumb where he had been chewing on it. He knew he had fucked up, even if he wasn’t sure how. Finally, and about time, he was nervous as hell.

Neither of us bothered to sit down. Richie told the camera, “Detective Kennedy and Detective Curran resuming interview with Conor Brennan”; then he leaned back in a corner at the edge of Conor’s vision, folded his arms and bumped one heel off the wall in a slow, nagging rhythm. I didn’t even try to stay still: I circled the room, fast, shoving chairs out of my way. Conor tried to watch both of us at once.

“Conor,” I said. “We need to talk.”

Conor said, “I want to go back to the cell.”

“And I want a date with Anna Kournikova. Life’s a bitch. Do you know what else I want, Conor?”

He shook his head.

“I want to know why this happened. I want to know why Jenny Spain is in the hospital and her family’s in the morgue. Do you want to do this the easy way, and just tell me now?”

Conor said, “You’ve got everything you need. I told you I did it. Who cares why?”

“I care. So does Detective Curran. So do plenty of other people, but we’re the ones you need to worry about right now.”

He shrugged. As I passed behind him, I pulled the evidence bag out of my pocket and threw it down on the table in front of him, hard enough that it bounced. “Explain this.”

Conor didn’t flinch: he had been ready for this. “It’s a badge.”

“No, Einstein. It’s not a badge. It’s this badge.” I leaned in over his shoulder, slapped down the summer ice-cream photo and stayed there, practically cheek to cheek with him. He smelled of harsh jail soap. “This badge right here, that you’re wearing in this photo right here. We found it in Jenny’s stuff. Where did she get it?”

He pointed at the photo with his chin. “There. She’s wearing it. We all had them.”

“You’re the only one who had this one. Photo analysis shows that the image on yours is off-center, to exactly the same degree as the image on this one here. None of the others match. So let’s try again: how did your badge get into Jenny Spain’s stuff?”

I love CSI: our techs don’t need to work miracles these days, because all the civilians think they can. After a moment Conor shifted away from me. He said, “I left it in their house.”

“Where?”

“Kitchen counter.”

I moved in again. “I thought you said you weren’t trying to scare the Spains. I thought you said no one would ever have known you were in the house. So what the hell is this? You figured they’d think it had materialized out of thin air? What?”

Conor’s hand came out to cover the badge, like it was private. “I figured Jenny would find it. She’s always the first one down in the mornings.”

“Get your hands off the evidence. Find it and what? Think the fairies had left it?”

“No.” His hand hadn’t moved. “I knew she’d guess it was me. I wanted her to.”

“Why?”

“Because. Just so she’d know she wasn’t on her own, out there. So she’d know I was still around. Still cared about her.”

“Oh, God. And then she’d dump Pat, run into your arms and live happily ever after. Are you on drugs, chum?”

A quick, vicious flash of disgust, before Conor’s eyes slid away from mine again. “Nothing like that. I just thought it’d make Jenny happy. OK?”

“This is how you make her happy?” I slapped his hand away and sent the evidence bag skidding across the table, out of reach. “Not with a card in the post, not with an e-mail that says, Hey, thinking of you: by breaking into her house and leaving her some rusty piece of shit that she’s probably completely forgotten. No wonder you’re single, sonny.”

Conor said, with absolute certainty, “She hadn’t forgotten. That summer, in that photo: we were happy. All of us. I think it was the happiest I’ve ever been. You don’t forget that. This was to remind Jenny of being happy.”

Richie said, from his corner, “Why, man?”

“What d’you mean, why?”

“Why did she need reminding? Why did she need telling that someone cared about her? She had Pat. Didn’t she?”

“He was a bit down. I told you.”

“You told us he’d been a bit down for months, but you weren’t into getting in touch in case it made things worse. What changed?”

Conor had tightened up. He was where we wanted him: dancing, second-guessing each step for booby traps. “Nothing. I just changed my mind.”

I leaned across him, whipped the evidence bag off the table and started circling the room again, tossing the bag from hand to hand. “You didn’t happen to notice an awful lot of baby monitors set up around the place, did you? While you were having your tea and sandwiches.”

“That’s what those were?” Conor’s face was a careful blank again: he had prepared for this one, too. “I thought they were walkie-talkies or something. Some game Pat and Jack were having, maybe.”

“They weren’t. Can you tell me why you think Pat and Jenny might have had half a dozen baby monitors spread around the house?”

Shrug. “Wouldn’t know.”

“Right. What about the holes in the walls? Did you notice those?”

“Yeah. Saw those. I knew all along that gaff was made of shite. They should’ve sued the scumbag that built it, only he’s probably declared bankruptcy and retired to the Costa del Sol to spend more time with his offshore accounts.”

“You can’t blame this one on the builders, sonny. Pat smashed those holes in his own walls, because he was going off the deep end trying to catch this mink or whatever it was. He covered the place with video monitors because he was obsessed with getting a look at this thing that was tap-dancing over his head. You’re trying to tell us, in all your hours of spying, you somehow failed to notice that?”

“I knew about the animal. I told you that.”

“Too bloody right, you knew. But you skipped the part where Pat was losing his fucking mind.” I dropped the bag, scooped it up with a toe and kicked it up to my hand again. “Oops.”

Richie pulled out a chair and sat down, across the table from Conor. “Man, we’ve recovered all the info off the computer. We know what state he was in. ‘Depressed’ doesn’t begin to cover it.”

Conor was breathing faster, nostrils flaring. “Computer?”

I said, “Let’s skip the part where you play dumb. It’s boring, it’s pointless and it puts me in a very fucking bad mood.” I gave the evidence bag a vicious bounce off the wall. “That OK with you?”

He kept his mouth shut. Richie said, “So let’s go again, yeah? Something changed, to make you leave that yoke for Jenny.” I waved the bag at Conor, between throws. “It was Pat, wasn’t it? He was getting worse.”

“If you already know, what are you asking me for?”

Richie said easily, “Standard procedure, man. We’re just checking that your story matches up with what we’ve got from other sources. If it all fits, then happy days, we believe you. If you’re telling us one thing and the evidence is telling us another…” He shrugged. “Then we’ve got a problem, and we’ve got to keep digging till we sort it. You get me?”

After a moment Conor said, “OK. Pat was getting worse. He wasn’t mental, not yelling at this animal to come out and fight, nothing like that. He was just having a tough time. OK?”

“But something must’ve happened. Something made you get in touch with Jenny, all of a sudden.”

Conor said simply, “She just looked so lonely. Pat hadn’t said a word to her in, like, two days-not that I saw. He was spending all his time sitting at the kitchen table with those monitors lined up in front of him, just staring. She’d tried to talk to him a couple of times, but he didn’t even look up. Wasn’t like they’d been catching up at night, either: the night before, he’d slept in the kitchen, on that beanbag.”

Conor had been up in that hide practically 24/7, by the end. I stopped playing with the evidence bag and stood still, behind him.

“Jenny… I saw her in the kitchen, waiting for the kettle to boil. Leaning her hands on the countertop, like she was too wrecked to stand up. Staring at nothing. Jack was pulling at her leg, trying to show her something; she didn’t even notice. She looked forty; more. Lost. I almost jumped straight down out of that house, straight over the wall, to put my arms around her.”

I said, keeping it expressionless, “So you decided what she really needed, at this difficult time in her life, was to find out she had a stalker.”

“I was just trying to help. I thought about calling in, or ringing up, or e-mailing her, but Jenny…” He shook his head heavily. “When things aren’t great, she doesn’t want to talk about it. She wouldn’t’ve wanted a chat, not with Pat all… So I just thought: something to let her know I was there. I went home and got the badge. Maybe I called it wrong. Sue me. It seemed like a good idea at the time.”

I asked, “At what time, exactly?”

“What?”

“When did you leave this in the Spains’ house?”

Conor had taken a breath to answer, but something caught him: I saw the sudden stiffening of his shoulders. He said, “I don’t remember.”

“Don’t even try that, chum. It’s not funny any more. When did you leave the badge?”

After a moment Conor said, “Sunday night.”

My eyes met Richie’s, across his head. I said, “This Sunday night just gone.”

“Yeah.”

“What time?”

“Five in the morning, maybe.”

“With all the Spains at home and asleep, a few yards away. I’ll say this for you, chum: you’ve certainly got a pair.”

“I just went in the back door, put it on the counter and left. I waited till Pat had gone to bed-he didn’t stay downstairs that night. No big deal.”

“What about the alarm?”

“I know the code. Watched Pat typing it in.”

Surprise, surprise. “Still,” I said. “It was risky. You must have been pretty desperate to get this done, am I right?”

“I wanted her to have it.”

“Of course you did. And twenty-four hours later, Jenny’s dying and her family’s dead. Don’t even try to tell me that’s a coincidence, Conor.”

“I’m not trying to tell you anything.”

“So what happened? She wasn’t happy with your little present? Wasn’t grateful enough? She shoved it in a drawer instead of wearing it?”

“She put it in her pocket. Don’t know what she did with it after that, and I don’t care. I just wanted her to have it.”

I got both hands on the back of Conor’s chair and said, low and hard and straight into his ear, “You’re so full of shit you make me want to flush your head down the jacks. You know damn well what Jenny thought of the badge. You knew it wasn’t going to scare her, because you put it into her hand yourself. Is that how you were working it, the two of you? She’d sneak downstairs late at night, leave Pat sleeping, and the two of you would fuck on the kids’ beanbag?”

He whipped round to face me, eyes like shards of ice. He wasn’t leaning back away from me, not this time; our faces were almost touching. “You make me sick. If you think that, if you honest to God think that, there’s something wrong with you.”

He wasn’t afraid. It came as a shock: you get used to people being afraid of you, guilty or innocent. Maybe, whether we admit it or not, all of us like it. Conor had no reason left to be afraid of me.

I said, “Fine: so it wasn’t on the beanbag. In your hideout? What are we going to find, when we swab that sleeping bag?”

“You swab away. Knock yourself out. She was never there.”

“Then where, Conor? On the beach? In Pat’s bed? Where did you and Jenny bump your uglies?”

He had his fists clenched on the folds of his jeans to stop himself from punching me. That couldn’t last, and I couldn’t wait. “I’d never have touched her. She’d never have touched me. Never. Are you too thick to get that?”

I laughed in his face. “Of course you would have. Oh, poor little lonely Jenny, stuck out there in that nasty estate: she just needed to know someone cared about her. Isn’t that what you said? You were gagging to be that guy. All that shite about her being sooo lonely, that was just a handy excuse so you could bang her without feeling guilty about Pat. When did it start?”

“Never. You’d do it, then that’s your problem. You’ve never had a real friend, never been in love, then that’s your problem.”

“Some real friend you were. That animal that was sending Pat over the edge: that was you, all along.”

That icy, incredulous stare again. “What are you-”

“How’d you do it? I’m not bothered about the noises-we’re going to trace the place where you bought the sound system, sooner or later-but I’d love to know just how you got the flesh off those squirrels. Knife? Boiling water? Your teeth?”

“I haven’t got a clue what you’re on about.”

“Fine. I’ll let our lab fill me in on the squirrels. Here’s the thing I really want to know: was it just you, this animal? Or was Jenny in on it too?”

Conor shoved back his chair, hard enough that it went tumbling, and stalked off across the room. I went after him so fast I didn’t even feel myself move. My rush backed him against the wall. “You don’t fucking walk away from me. I’m talking to you, sonny boy. When I talk, you fucking listen.”

His face was rigid, a mask carved from hard wood. He was staring past me, eyes narrowed and focused on nothing.

“She was helping you, wasn’t she? Did the two of you have a laugh about it, up in your little hideout? That eejit Pat, that sucker, falling for every piece of crap you fed him-”

“Jenny did nothing.”

“Everything was going so well, wasn’t it? Pat getting crazier every day, Jenny snuggling up closer to you. And then this happened.” I shoved the evidence bag at him, so close that I felt it brush his cheek. I just managed not to grind it into his face. “Turned out to be a big mistake, didn’t it? You thought it’d be a lovely romantic gesture, but all it did was send Jenny on a massive guilt trip. Like you said, she was happy, that summer. Happy with Pat. And you went and reminded her of it. All of a sudden, she felt like shit about slutting around on him. She decided it had to stop.”

“She wasn’t slutting-”

“How did she tell you? A note in your hideout? She didn’t even bother to break it off face-to-face, did she?”

“There was nothing to break off. She didn’t even know I was-”

I threw the evidence bag somewhere and slammed my hands against the wall on either side of Conor’s head, pinning him in. My voice was rising and I didn’t care. “Did you decide right then that you were going to kill them all? Or were you just going to get Jenny, and then you figured what the hell, might as well go the whole hog? Or was this how you planned it all along: Pat and the kids dead, Jenny alive and in hell?”

Nothing. I banged my hands off the wall; he didn’t even jump.

“All this, Conor, all of this, because you wanted Pat’s life instead of getting your own. Was it worth it? How good a fuck is this woman?”

“I never-”

“Shut the fuck up. I know you were banging her. I know it. I know it for a fact. I know it because that’s the only way this whole fucking nightmare makes any sense.”

“Get away from me.”

“Make me. Come on, Conor. Hit me. Push me away. Just one shove.” I was shouting, straight into his face. My palms hit the wall again and again and the judders ran up through my bones, but if there was pain I didn’t feel it. I had never done anything like this before and I couldn’t remember why because it felt incredible, it felt like pure savage joy. “You were a big man when you were fucking your best mate’s wife, big man when you were smothering a three-year-old-where’s the big man now that you’re up against someone your own size? Come on, big man, show me what you’ve got-”

Conor wasn’t moving a muscle, those narrow eyes were still fixed on the nothing over my shoulder. We were almost touching from faces to shoes, inches between us, less. I knew the video camera would never catch it, just one jab to the stomach, one lift of the knee, Richie would back me up- “Come on, you motherfucker, you cocksucker, hit me, I’m begging you, give me an excuse-”

One thing was warm and solid: something on my shoulder, holding me in place, holding my feet down on the ground. I almost threw it off before I understood that it was Richie’s hand. “Detective Kennedy,” his voice said mildly, in my ear. “This fella’s definite that there was nothing going on between him and Jenny. I figure that’s fair enough. Don’t you?”

I stared at him like an idiot, mouth open. I didn’t know whether to punch him or clutch at him for dear life.

Richie said matter-of-factly, “I’d love a quick chat with Conor. Is that all right?”

I still couldn’t speak. I nodded and backed away. The walls had printed their ragged texture deep into my palms.

Richie turned two chairs away from the table to face each other, just a couple of feet apart. “Conor,” he said, motioning to one of them. “Have a seat.”

Conor didn’t move. His face still had that rigidity. I couldn’t tell if he had heard the words.

“Go on. I’m not gonna ask about your motive, and I don’t think you and Jenny were doing the bold thing. Swear to God. I just need to clear up a couple of bits and pieces, just for myself. OK?”

After a moment Conor dropped into the chair. Something in the movement-the sudden looseness of it, as if his legs had gone under him-made me realize: I had been getting to him, after all. He had been a hairsbreadth from breaking: howling at me, hitting me, I would never know what. I could have been a hairsbreadth from the answer.

I wanted to roar, send Richie flying and get my hands around Conor’s throat. Instead I stood there, with my hands hanging at my sides and my mouth open, gawking uselessly at the pair of them. After a moment I saw the evidence bag, crumpled in a corner, and bent to get it. The movement sent heartburn shooting up my throat, hot and corrosive.

Richie asked Conor, “You all right?”

Conor had his elbows braced on his knees and his hands clasped tight. “I’m fine.”

“Would you have a cup of tea? Coffee? Water?”

“I’m fine.”

“Good,” Richie said peacefully, taking the other chair and shifting himself comfortable. “I just want to make sure I’m clear on a few things. OK?”

“Whatever.”

“Deadly. Just to start with: how bad did Pat get, exactly?”

“He was depressed. He wasn’t going up the walls, but yeah, he was down. I said that.”

Richie scraped at something on the knee of his trousers, tilted his head to squint at it. He said, “Tell you something I’ve noticed. Every time we start talking about Pat, you’re straight in to tell us he wasn’t crazy. Did you notice that?”

“Because he wasn’t.”

Richie nodded, still inspecting his trousers. He said, “When you went in, Monday night. Was the computer on?”

Conor examined that from every angle before he answered. “No. Off.”

“It had a password. How’d you get past that?”

“Guessed. Once, back before Jack was born, I gave Pat shit about using ‘Emma’ for some password. He just laughed, said it’d be grand. I figured there was a decent chance any password since Jack came along would be ‘EmmaJack.’”

“Fair play to you. So you turned on the computer, wiped all the internet stuff. Why?”

“It was none of your business.”

“Is that where you’d found out about the animal, yeah? On the computer?”

Conor’s eyes, empty of everything except wariness, came up to meet Richie’s. Richie didn’t blink. He said steadily, “We’ve read the lot. We already know.”

Conor said, “I went in one day, a couple of months back. The computer was on. Some board full of hunters, all trying to figure out what was in Pat and Jenny’s gaff. I went through the browser history: more of the same.”

“Why didn’t you tell us to start with?”

“Didn’t want you getting the wrong idea.”

Richie said, “You mean you didn’t want us thinking Pat went mental and killed his family. Am I right?”

“Because he didn’t. I did.”

“Fair enough. But the stuff on the computer, that had to tell you Pat wasn’t in great shape. Didn’t it?”

Conor’s head moved. “It’s the internet. You can’t go by what people say on there.”

“Still, but. If that was one of my mates, I’d’ve been worried.”

“I was.”

“I figured that, all right. Ever see him crying?”

“Yeah. Twice.”

“Arguing with Jenny?”

“Yeah.”

“Giving her a slap?” Conor’s chin shot up angrily, but Richie had a hand raised, silencing him. “Hang on. I’m not just pulling this out of my arse. We’ve got evidence that says he was hitting her.”

“That’s a load of-”

“Just give me a sec, yeah? I want to be sure I say this right. Pat had been following the rules all along, doing everything he was told, and then the rules dropped him in the shite, big-time. Like you said yourself: who was he, once that happened? People who don’t know who they are, man, they’re dangerous. They could do anything. I don’t think anyone’d be shocked if Pat lost the run of himself, now and then. I’m not excusing it or nothing; just saying I can see how it could happen even to a good guy.”

Conor said, “Can I answer now?”

“Go ahead.”

“Pat never hurt Jenny. Never hurt the kids, either. Yeah, he was in tatters. Yeah, I saw him punch a wall a couple of times-the last time, he couldn’t use that hand for days after; probably it was bad enough that he should’ve gone to the hospital. But her, the kids… never.”

Richie asked, “Why didn’t you get in touch with him, man?”

He sounded genuinely curious. Conor said, “I wanted to. Thought about it all the time. But Pat, he’s a stubborn bollix. If things had been going great for him, then he’d have been delighted to hear from me again. But with everything gone to shite, with me having been right… he’d have slammed the door in my face.”

“You could’ve tried anyway.”

“Yeah. I could’ve.”

The bitterness in his voice burned. Richie was leaning forward, his head bent close to Conor’s. “And you feel bad about that, right? About not even trying.”

“Yeah. I feel like shit.”

“So would I, man. What would you do to make up for it?”

“Whatever. Anything.”

Richie’s clasped hands were almost touching Conor’s. He said, very gently, “You’ve done great for Pat. You’ve been a good mate; you’ve taken good care of him. If there’s someplace after we die, he’s thanking you now.”

Conor stared at the floor and bit down on his lips, hard. He was trying not to cry.

“But Pat’s dead, man. Where he is now, there’s nothing left that can hurt him. Whatever people know about him, whatever people think: it doesn’t matter to him now.”

Conor caught his breath, one great raw heave, and bit down again.

“Time to tell me, man. You were up in your hide, and you saw Pat going for Jenny. You legged it down there, but you were too late. That’s what happened, isn’t it?”

Another heave, wrenching his body like a sob.

“I know you wish you’d done more, but it’s time to stop making up for that. You don’t need to protect Pat any more. He’s safe. It’s OK.”

He sounded like a best friend, like a brother, like the one person in the world who cared. Conor managed to look up, openmouthed and gasping. In that moment I was sure Richie had him. I couldn’t tell which one was strongest: the relief, or the shame, or the fury.

Then Conor leaned back in the chair and dragged his hands over his face. He said, through his fingers, “Pat never touched them.”

After a moment Richie eased backwards too. “OK,” he said, nodding. “OK. Grand. Just one more question, and I’ll fuck off and leave you alone. Answer me this and Pat’s in the clear. What did you do to the kids?”

“Get your doctors to tell you.”

“They have. Like I told you before: cross-checking.”

No one had gone upstairs from the kitchen, after the bloodshed began. If Conor had come running when he saw the struggle, he had come through the back door, into the kitchen, and he had left the same way, without ever going upstairs. If he knew how Emma and Jack had died, it was because he was our man.

Conor folded his arms, braced a foot against the table and shoved his chair around to face me, giving Richie his back. His eyes were red. He said, to me, “I did it because I was mad for Jenny and she wouldn’t go near me. That’s the motive. Put that in a statement. I’ll sign.”

The corridor felt cold as a ruin. We needed to take Conor’s statement and send him back to his cell, update the Super and the floaters, write up our reports. Neither of us moved away from the interview-room door.

Richie said, “You all right?”

“Yeah.”

“Was that OK? What I did. I wasn’t sure if…”

He let it trail off. I said, without looking at him, “Thanks. I appreciate it.”

“No problem.”

“You were good, in there. I thought you had him.”

Richie said, “So did I.” His voice sounded strange. We were both near the end of our strength.

I found my comb and tried to get my hair back in place, but I had no mirror and I couldn’t focus. I said, “That motive he’s giving us, that’s crap. He’s still lying to us.”

“Yeah.”

“There’s still something we’re missing. We’ve got all of tomorrow, and most of tomorrow night if we need it.” The thought made me close my eyes.

Richie said, “You wanted to be sure.”

“Yeah.”

“Are you?”

I groped for that feeling, that sweet patter of things falling into all the right places. It was nowhere; it felt like some pathetic fantasy, like a child’s stories about his stuffed toys fighting off the monsters in the dark. “No,” I said. My eyes were still closed. “I’m not sure.”

That night I woke up hearing the ocean. Not the restless, insistent shove and tug of the waves on Broken Harbor; this was a sound like a great hand stroking my hair, the miles-wide roll of breakers on some gentle Pacific beach. It was coming from outside my bedroom door.

Dina, I told myself, feeling my heartbeat in the roof of my mouth. Dina watching something on the TV, to put herself to sleep. The relief took my breath away. Then I remembered: Dina was somewhere else, on Jezzer’s flea-ridden sofa, in a reeking laneway. For an upside-down second my stomach jerked with pure terror, like I was the one on my own with nobody to keep down the wilds of my mind, like she was the one who had been protecting me.

I kept my eyes on the door and eased open the drawer of my bedside table. The cold weight of my gun was comforting, solid. Outside the door the waves soothed on, unperturbed.

I had the bedroom door open, my back against the wall and my gun up and ready all in one move. The living room was empty and dark, wan rectangles of off-black in the windows, my coat huddled over the arm of the sofa. There was a thin line of white light around the kitchen door. The sound of waves surged louder. It was coming from the kitchen.

I bit down on the inside of my cheek till I tasted blood. Then I moved across the living room, carpet prickling at the soles of my feet, and kicked the kitchen door open.

The fluorescent strip light under the cupboards was on, giving an alien glow to a knife and half an apple I had forgotten on the countertop. The roar of the ocean rose up and rolled over me, blood-warm and skin-soft, like I could have dropped my gun and let myself fall forwards into it, let myself be carried away.

The radio was off. All the appliances were off, only the fridge humming grimly to itself-I had to lean close to catch the sound, under the waves. When I could hear that and the snap of my fingers, I knew there was nothing wrong with my hearing. I pressed my ear against the neighbors’ wall: nothing. I pressed harder, hoping for a murmur of voices or a snip of a television show, something to prove that my apartment hadn’t transformed into something weightless and free-floating, that I was still anchored in a solid building, surrounded by warm life. Silence.

I waited for a long time for the sound to fade. When I understood that it wasn’t going to, I switched off the strip light, closed the kitchen door and went back to my bedroom. I sat on the edge of the bed, pressing circles into my palm with the barrel of the gun and wishing for something I could shoot, listening to the waves sigh like some great sleeping animal and trying to remember turning the strip light on.