Broken Harbour

17

I slept through my alarm. My first look at the clock-almost nine-shot me out of bed with my heart drumming. I couldn’t remember the last time I had done that, no matter how wrecked I was; I have myself trained to be awake and sitting up at the first tone. I threw on my clothes and left, no shower or shave or breakfast. The dream, or whatever it was, had snagged in a corner of my mind, scrabbling at me like something terrible happening just out of sight. When the traffic backed up-it was raining hard-I had to fight the urge to leave my car where it was and run the rest of the way. The dash from the car park to HQ left me dripping.

Quigley was on the first landing, spread out along a railing, wearing a hideous checked jacket and crackling a brown paper evidence bag between his fingers. On a Saturday I should have been safe from Quigley-it wasn’t like he was working some huge case that needed 24/7 attention-but he’s always behind on his paperwork; probably he had come in to try and bully one of my floaters into doing it for him. “Detective Kennedy,” he said. “Could we have a little word?”

He had been waiting for me. That should have been my first warning. “I’m in a hurry,” I said.

“This is me doing you a favor, Detective. Not the other way round.”

The echo sent his voice spinning up the stairwell, even though he was keeping the volume down. That sticky, hushed tone should have been my second warning, but I was soaked and rushed and I had bigger things than Quigley on my mind. I almost kept walking. It was the evidence bag that stopped me. It was one of the small ones, the size of my palm; I couldn’t see the window, it could have held anything. If Quigley had got hold of something to do with the case, and if I didn’t fluff his slimy little ego, he could make sure a filing glitch kept that bag from getting to me for weeks. “Fire away,” I said, keeping one shoulder pointed towards the next flight of stairs so he knew this chat wasn’t a long one.

“That’s a good choice, Detective. Do you happen to know a young female, twenty-five to thirty-five, about five foot four, very slim build, chin-length dark hair? I should probably say very attractive, if you don’t mind them a bit scruffy-like.”

For a second I thought I would have to grab the banister. Quigley’s jab slid right off me; all I could think of was a Jane Doe with my number on her phone, a ring pulled off a cold finger and tossed in an evidence bag for identification. “What’s happened to her?”

“So you do know her?”

“Yeah. I know her. What’s happened?”

Quigley stretched it out, arching his eyebrows and trying to look enigmatic, till the precise second before I would have slammed him against the wall. “She came waltzing in here first thing this morning. Wanted to see Mikey Kennedy right away, if you don’t mind; wouldn’t take no for an answer. Mikey, is it? I would’ve bet you’d like them cleaner, more respectable, but there’s no accounting for tastes.”

He smirked at me. I couldn’t answer. The relief felt like it had sucked out my insides.

“Bernadette told her you weren’t in and she should take a seat and wait, but that wasn’t good enough for Little Miss Emergency. She was giving terrible hassle, raising her voice and all. Shocking carry-on. I suppose some people like the drama queens, but this is a Garda building, not a nightclub.”

I said, “Where is she?”

“Your girlfriends aren’t my responsibility, Detective Kennedy. I just happened to be on my way in, and I saw the ruckus she was causing. I thought I’d give you a helping hand, show the young woman that she can’t be coming in here like the Queen of Sheba demanding this, that and the other. So I let her know that I was a friend of yours, and anything she wanted to say to you, she could say to me.”

I had my hands stuffed in my coat pockets to hide my clenched fists. I said, “You mean you bullied her into talking to you.”

Quigley’s lips vanished. “You don’t want to take that tone with me, Detective. I didn’t bully her into anything. I brought her into an interview room and we had a wee chat. She took a bit of convincing, but in the end she realized that you’re always better off following garda orders.”

I said, keeping my voice level, “You threatened to arrest her.” The thought of being locked up would have sent Dina into an animal panic; I could almost hear the wild jabber surging up inside her mind. I kept my fists where they were and focused on the thought of filing every complaint in the book on Quigley’s flabby arse. I didn’t give a damn if he had the chief commissioner in his pocket and I ended up investigating sheep rustlers in Leitrim for the rest of my life, as long as I took this lump of shit down with me.

Quigley said virtuously, “She was holding stolen police property. I couldn’t ignore that, could I, now? If she refused to hand it over, it was my duty to place her under arrest.”

“What are you talking about? What stolen police property?” I tried to think what I could have brought home, a file, a photo, what on earth I wouldn’t have missed by now. Quigley gave me a nauseating little smile and held up the evidence bag.

I tilted it towards the weak, pearly light from the landing window-he didn’t let go. For a second I didn’t understand what I was seeing. It was a woman’s fingernail, neatly filed and manicured, painted a smooth pinkish-beige. It had been ripped off at the quick. Caught in a crack was a wisp of rose-pink wool.

Quigley was saying something, somewhere, but I couldn’t hear him. The air had turned dense and savage, pounding at my skull, gibbering in a thousand mindless voices. I needed to turn my face away, shove Quigley to the floor and run. I couldn’t move. My eyes felt like they had been pinned wide open.

The handwriting on the evidence-bag label was familiar, firm and forward-slanting, not Quigley’s semi-literate scrawl. Collected sitting room, residence of Conor Brennan… Cold air, smell of apples, Richie’s drawn face.

When I could hear again, Quigley was still talking. The stairwell turned his voice sibilant and disembodied. “At first I thought, well, holy God, the great Scorcher Kennedy leaving evidence lying around for his bit of fluff to pick up on her way out: who would’ve thought it?” He gave a snigger. I could almost feel it, dripping down my face like stale grease. “But then, while I was waiting for you to honor us, I had a wee read of your case file-I’d never intrude, but you can see why I needed to know where this yoke here might fit in, so I could decide on the right thing to do. And didn’t I spot something interesting? That handwriting there: it’s not yours-sure, I know yours, after all this time-but it shows up an awful lot, in the file.” He tapped his temple. “They don’t call me a detective for nothing, amn’t I right?”

I wanted to crush the bag in my hand till it crumbled to dust and vanished, till even the image of it was squashed out of my mind. Quigley said, “I knew you’d got thick as thieves, yourself and young Curran, but I never guessed you were sharing that much.” The snigger again. “So I’m wondering, now: did the young lady get this off you, or off Curran?”

Somewhere far inside my mind, one corner was moving again, methodically as a machine. Twenty-five years’ worth of working my arse off to learn control. Friends have slagged me for it, newbies have rolled their eyes when I gave them the speech. Fuck them all. It was worth it, for that conversation on a drafty landing when I held it together. When this case sets its claws scrabbling circles around the inside of my skull, the only thing I have left to tell myself is that it could have been worse.

Quigley was loving this, every second, and I could use that. I heard myself say, cool as ice, “Don’t tell me you forgot to ask her.”

I had been right: he couldn’t resist. “Holy God, the drama. Wouldn’t give me her name, wouldn’t give me any information on where and how she came into possession of this here-when I put the pressure on, just gently, like, she went only hysterical. I’m not joking you: she pulled out a great clump of her hair by the roots, screamed at me that she was going to tell you I’d done it. Now, I wasn’t worried about that-any sensible man would take the word of an officer over the say-so of some young one-but the girl’s mad as a bag of cats. I could have got her talking easily enough, but there was no point: I couldn’t rely on a word she said. I’m telling you, it doesn’t matter how tasty she is, that one belongs in a straitjacket.”

I said, “Shame you didn’t have one handy.”

“I’d have been doing you a favor, so I would.”

The squad-room door slammed open above us and three of the lads headed down the corridor towards the canteen, bitching colorfully about some witness who had suddenly developed amnesia. Quigley and I pressed back against the wall, like conspirators, until their voices faded. I said, “What did you do with her instead?”

“I told her she needed to get a hold of herself and she was free to go, and off she flounced. Gave Bernadette the finger on the way out. Lovely.” With his arms folded and his chins tucked in sourly, he looked like a fat old woman bitching about wanton modern youth. That icy, detached corner of me almost wanted to smile. Dina had scared the shit out of Quigley. Every now and then, the crazy comes in useful. “Your girlfriend, is she? Or a little treat you bought for yourself? How much do you think she’d have wanted for this yoke, if she’d found you this morning?”

I wagged a finger at him. “Be nice, chum. She’s a lovely girl.”

“She’s a very lucky girl that I didn’t place her under arrest for the theft. Just as a favor to you, that was. I think you owe me a nice polite thank-you.”

“Sounds like she brightened up a boring morning. Maybe you’re the one who should be thanking me.”

This conversation wasn’t going the way Quigley had planned. “So,” he said, trying to get it back. He held up the evidence bag and gave the top a little squeeze between those fat white fingers. “Tell us, Detective. This yoke here. How bad do you need it?”

He hadn’t worked it out. The relief rushed over me like a breaker. I brushed rain off my sleeve and shrugged. “Who knows? Thanks for getting it off the young woman, and all that, but I can’t see it being exactly make-or-break stuff.”

“You’d want to be sure, wouldn’t you? Because as soon as the story goes on the record, it’s no good to you any more.”

We forget to hand in evidence, every once in a while. It’s not supposed to happen, but it does: you’re taking off your suit at night and find a bulge in your pocket where you shoved an envelope when a witness asked for a word, or you open your car boot and there’s the bag you meant to hand in the night before. As long as no one else has had access to your pockets or keys to your car, it’s not the end of the world. But Dina had had this in her possession, for hours or days. If we ever tried to bring it into court, a defense lawyer would argue that she could have done anything from breathing on the evidence to exchanging it for something completely different.

Evidence doesn’t always come to us pristine from the crime scene: witnesses hand it in weeks later, it lies in a field getting rained on for months until a dog noses it out. We work with what we’ve got and find ways to head off the defense arguments. This was different. We had tainted this ourselves, and so it tainted everything else we had touched. If we tried to bring it in, then every move we had made in this investigation would be up for grabs: that could have been planted, he could have been bullied, we could have invented that to suit ourselves. We had broken the rules once. Why should anyone believe that had been the only time?

I gave the bag a dismissive flick with one finger-touching it made my spine leap. “It might’ve been fun to have, if it turned out to link our suspect to the crime scene. But we’ve got plenty of stuff that does that anyway. I think we’ll survive.”

Quigley’s sharp little eyes crawled over my face, checking. “Either way,” he said, in the end. He was trying to hide a pissed-off note. I had convinced him. “Even if this doesn’t turn your case to shite, it could have done. The Super’ll hit the roof when he hears one of his dream team’s been handing out evidence like sweeties-and on this case, out of all the ones in the world. Those poor little kiddies.” He shook his head, clicked his tongue reproachfully. “You’re fond of young Curran, aren’t you? You wouldn’t want to see him reverted to uniform before he even gets off the starting blocks. All that promise, all that great working relationship the two of you have, all wasted. Wouldn’t that be a shame?”

“Curran’s a big boy. He can take care of himself.”

“A-ha,” Quigley said smugly, pointing at me, like I had slipped up and revealed some big secret. “Will I take that to mean he’s the bold lad, after all?”

“Take it whatever way you like it, chum. And if you like it, take it again.”

“It doesn’t matter, sure. Even if it was Curran that did it, he’s only on probation; you’re the one that’s meant to be minding him. If anyone were to find out about this… Wouldn’t that be dreadful timing, and you just on your way back up?” Quigley had edged close enough that I could see the wet glisten of his lips, the sheen of dirt and grease grained into his jacket collar. “No one wants that to happen. I’m sure we can come to an arrangement.”

For an instant I thought he meant money. For an even briefer, disgraceful splinter of time I thought of saying yes. I have savings, in case something were to happen to me and Dina needed looking after; not a lot, but enough to shut Quigley’s mouth, save Richie, save myself, set the ricocheting world back in its orbit and let us all keep going as if nothing had happened.

Then I understood: it was me he wanted, and there was no way back to safe. He wanted to work with me on the good cases, take credit for anything I came up with, and offload the no-hopers onto me; he wanted to bask while I sang his praises to O’Kelly, warn me with a meaningful eyebrow-lift when something wasn’t good enough, soak up the sight of Scorcher Kennedy at his mercy. It would never end.

I want to believe that that wasn’t the reason I turned Quigley down. I know how many people would take it for granted that it was just that simple, that my ego wouldn’t let me spend the rest of my career coming running to his whistle and making sure I got his coffee just right. I still pray to believe that I said no because it was the right thing to do.

I said, “I wouldn’t come to an arrangement with you if you had a bomb strapped to my chest.”

That pushed Quigley back a step, out of my face, but he wasn’t going to give up that easily. His prize was so close he was practically drooling. “Don’t be saying anything you’ll regret, Detective Kennedy. No one needs to know where this was last night. You can sort your bit of fluff; she won’t say a word. Neither will Curran, if he’s got any sense in his head. This can go straight to the evidence room, like nothing ever happened.” He shook the bag; I heard the dry rattle of the fingernail on paper. “It’ll be our wee secret. You have a think about that, before you go disrespecting me.”

“There’s nothing to think about.”

After a moment, Quigley leaned back against the railing. “I’ll tell you something for nothing, Kennedy,” he said. His tone had changed; all the creamy fake-buddy coating had fallen away. “I knew you were going to fuck this case up. The second you came back from seeing the Super, Tuesday, I knew. You always thought you were something special, didn’t you? Mr. Perfect, never put a toe out of line. And look at you now.” That smirk again, this time halfway to a snarl, alive with malice that he wasn’t bothering to hide any more. “I’d only love to know: what was it made you cross the line on this one? Was it just that you’ve been a saint so long, you figured you could get away with anything you like, no one would ever suspect the great Scorcher Kennedy?”

Not paperwork after all, not the chance to borrow one of my floaters. Quigley had come in to work on a Saturday morning because God forbid he should miss the moment when I went arse over tip. I said, “I wanted to make your day, old son. Looks like I succeeded.”

“You always took me for a fool. Let’s all take the piss out of Quigley, the great thick eejit, sure he won’t even notice. Go on and tell me: if you’re the hero and I’m the fool, then how come you’re the one that’s deep in the shit, and I’m the one that saw it coming all along?”

He was wrong. I had never underestimated him. I had always known about Quigley’s one skill: his hyena nose, the instinct that pulls him snuffling and salivating towards shaky suspects, frightened witnesses, wobbly-legged newbies, anything that flashes soft spots or smells of blood. Where I had gone wrong was in believing that didn’t mean me. All those years of endless excruciating therapy sessions, of staying vigilant over every move and word and thought; I had been sure I was mended, all the breaks healed, all the blood washed away. I knew I had earned my way to safety. I had believed, beyond any doubt, that that meant I was safe.

The moment I said Broken Harbor to O’Kelly, every faded scar in my mind had lit up like a beacon. I had walked the glittering lines of those scars, obedient as a farm animal, from that moment straight to this one. I had moved through this case shining like Conor Brennan had shone on that dark road, a blazing signal for predators and scavengers far and wide.

I said, “You’re not a fool, Quigley. You’re a disgrace. I could fuck up every hour on the hour, from now till I retire, and still be a better cop than you’ll ever be. I’m ashamed to be on the same squad as you.”

“You’re in luck, then, aren’t you? You might not have to put up with me much longer. Not once the Super sees this.”

I said, “I’ll take it from here.”

I held out a hand for the bag, but Quigley whipped it out of reach. He prissed up his mouth and deliberated, swinging the bag between finger and thumb. “I’m not sure I can give you this, now. How do I know where it’ll end up?”

When I got my breath back, I said, “You make me sick.”

Quigley’s face curdled, but he saw something in mine that shut him up. He dropped the bag into my hand like it was filthy. “I’ll be submitting a full report,” he informed me. “As soon as possible.”

I said, “You do that. Just stay out of my way.” I shoved the evidence bag into my pocket and left him there.

I went up to the top floor, shut myself in a cubicle in the gents’ and leaned my forehead against the clammy plastic of the door. My mind had turned slippery and treacherous as black ice, I couldn’t get purchase; every thought seemed to send me lurching through into freezing water, grabbing for solid ground and finding nothing. When my hands finally stopped shaking, I opened the door and went downstairs to the incident room.

It was overheated and buzzing, floaters taking calls, updating the whiteboard, drinking coffee and laughing at a dirty joke and having some kind of debate about blood-spatter patterns. All the energy made me dizzy. I picked my way through it feeling like my legs might go at any second.

Richie was at his desk, shirtsleeves rolled up, messing around with report sheets and not seeing them. I threw my sodden coat over the back of my chair, leaned over to him and said quietly, “We’re going to collect a few pieces of paper each and leave the room, like we’re in a hurry, but without making a big deal of it. Let’s go.”

He stared for a second. His eyes were bloodshot; he looked like shit. Then he nodded, picked up a handful of reports and pushed back his chair.

There’s an interview room, down at the far end of the top-floor corridor, that we never use unless we have to. The heating doesn’t work-even in the heart of summer the room feels chilled, subterranean-and something wrong with the wiring means that the strip lights give off a raw, eye-splitting blaze and burn out every week or two. We went there.

Richie closed the door behind us. He stayed beside it, sheaf of pointless paper hanging forgotten from one hand, eyes skittery as a corner boy’s. That was what he looked like: some malnourished scumbag hunched against a graffitied wall, standing lookout for small-time dealers in exchange for a fix. I had been beginning to think of this man as my partner. His skinny shoulder braced against mine had begun to feel like something that belonged. The feeling had been a good one, a warm one. Both of us made me sick.

I took the evidence bag out of my pocket and put it down on the table.

Richie bit down on both his lips, but he didn’t flinch or startle. The last scatter of hope blew out of me. He had been expecting this.

The silence went on forever. Probably Richie thought I was using it to bear down on him, the way I would have with a suspect. I felt as if the air of the room had turned crystalline, brittle, and when I spoke it would shatter into a million razor-edged shards and rain down on our heads, slice us both to rags.

Finally I said, “A woman handed it in this morning. The description matches my sister.”

That hit Richie. His head snapped up and he stared at me, sick-faced and forgetting to breathe. I said, “I’d like to know how the fuck she got her hands on this.”

“Your sister?”

“The woman you saw waiting for me outside here, on Tuesday night.”

“I didn’t know she was your sister. You never said.”

“And I didn’t know it was any of your business. How did she get hold of this?”

Richie slumped back against the door and ran a hand across his mouth. “She showed up at my gaff,” he said, without looking at me. “Last night.”

“How did she know where you live?”

“I don’t know. I walked home, yesterday-I needed a chance to think.” A glance-a quick one, like it hurt-at the table. “I figure she must’ve been waiting outside here again, either for me or for you. She must’ve seen me come out, followed me home. I was only in the door five minutes when I heard the bell.”

“And you invited her in for a cup of tea and a nice chat? Is that what you normally do when strange women show up at your door?”

“She asked could she come in. She was freezing; I could see her shivering. And she wasn’t some randomer. I remembered her, from Tuesday night.” Of course he had. Men, in particular, don’t forget Dina in a hurry. “I wasn’t going to let a mate of yours freeze on my doorstep.”

“You’re a real saint. It didn’t occur to you to, I don’t know, ring me and tell me she was there?”

“It did occur to me. I was going to. But she was… she wasn’t in great shape, man. She was holding on to my arm and going, over and over, ‘Don’t tell Mikey I’m here, don’t you dare tell Mikey, he’ll freak out…’ I would’ve done it anyway, only she didn’t give me a chance. Even when I went to the jacks, she made me leave my phone with her-and my flatmates were down the pub, it wasn’t like I could drop them a hint or get her talking to one of them while I texted you. In the end I thought, no harm done, she’s somewhere safe for the night, you and me could talk in the morning.”

“‘No harm done,’” I said. “Is that what you call this?”

A short, twisting silence. I said, “What did she want?”

Richie said, “She was worried about you.”

I laughed loud enough to startle both of us. “Oh, she was, was she? That’s a fucking riot. I think you know Dina well enough at this stage to have spotted that, if anyone needs worrying about, it’s her. You’re a detective, chum. That means you’re supposed to notice the bleeding obvious. My sister is as mad as a hatter. She’s five beers short of a six-pack. She’s up the wall and swinging from the chandelier. Please don’t tell me you missed that.”

“She didn’t seem crazy to me. Upset, yeah, up to ninety, but that was because she was worried about you. Properly worried, like. Freaking-out worried.”

“That’s exactly what I’m talking about. That is crazy. Worried about what?”

“This case. What it was doing to you. She said-”

“The only thing Dina knows about this case is that it exists. That’s it. And even that was enough to send her off the fucking deep end.” I never tell anyone that Dina is crazy. People have raised the possibility to me before, on occasion; none of them made that mistake twice. “Do you want to know how I spent Tuesday night? Listening to her rave about how she couldn’t sleep in her flat because her shower curtain was ticking like a grandfather clock. Want to know how I spent Wednesday evening? Trying to convince her not to set fire to the heap of paper that she had left of my books.”

Richie shifted, uneasily, against the door. “I don’t know about any of that. She wasn’t like that at my place.”

Something in my stomach clamped tight. “Of course she bloody well wasn’t. She knew you’d be on the phone to me in a heartbeat, and that didn’t suit her plans. She’s crazy, not stupid. And she’s got some serious willpower, when she feels like it.”

“She said she’d been over at yours the last few nights, talking to you, and the case had your head melted. She…” He glanced at me. He was picking his words carefully. “She said you weren’t OK. She said you’d always been good to her, never once been anything but gentle, even when she didn’t deserve it-that’s what she said-but the other night she startled you, when she showed up, and you pulled your gun. She said she left because you told her she should kill herself.”

“And you believed that.”

“I figured she was exaggerating. But still… She wasn’t making it up about you being stressed, man. She said you were coming apart, this case was taking you apart, and there was no way you’d put it down.”

I couldn’t tell, through all this dark snarled mess, whether this was Dina’s revenge for something real or imaginary that I had done to her, or whether she had seen something I had missed, something that had sent her banging on Richie’s door like a panicked bird beating against a window. I couldn’t tell, either, which one would be worse.

“She said to me, ‘You’re his partner, he trusts you. You have to look after him. He won’t let me, he won’t let his family, maybe he might let you.’”

I said, “Did you sleep with her?”

I had been trying not to ask. The fraction of silence, after Richie opened his mouth, told me everything I needed to know. I said, “Don’t bother answering that.”

“Listen, man, listen-you never said she was your sister. Neither did she. I swear to God, if I’d’ve known-”

I had come within a hairsbreadth of telling him. I had held back because, God help me, I thought it would make me vulnerable. “What did you think she was? My girlfriend? My ex? My daughter? How exactly would any of those have made it better?”

“She said she was an old mate of yours. She said she knew you from back when you were kids-your family and her family used to get caravans together at Broken Harbor, for the summer. That’s what she told me. Why would I think she was lying?”

“How about because she’s fucking nutso? She comes in babbling about a case she hasn’t got a clue about, drowning you in bullshit about me having a nervous breakdown. Ninety percent of what she says is gibberish. It doesn’t even occur to you that the other ten percent might not be on the level?”

“It wasn’t gibberish, but. She was dead right: this case, it’s been getting to you. I thought that from the start, almost.”

Every breath hurt on its way in. “That’s sweet. I’m touched. So you felt the appropriate response was to fuck my sister.”

Richie looked like he would happily saw his own arm off if it would make this conversation go away. “It wasn’t like that.”

“How in the name of sweet jumping Jesus was it not like that? Did she drug you? Handcuff you to the bedpost?”

“I didn’t go in there planning to… I don’t think she did either.”

“Are you seriously trying to tell me how my sister thinks? After one night?”

“No. I’m just saying-”

“Because I know her a lot better than you do, chum, and even I struggle for any clue about what goes on in her head. I think it’s more than possible that she went to your house planning on doing exactly what she did. I’m one hundred percent positive that this was her idea, not yours. That doesn’t mean you had to play along. What the holy hell were you thinking?”

“Honest to God, it was just one thing led to another. She was scared this case would mess you up, she was going in circles around my sitting room, crying-she couldn’t sit down, she was that upset. I gave her a hug, just to settle her-”

“And that’s where you shut up. I don’t need the graphic details.” I didn’t; I could see exactly how it had gone down. It’s so, so lethally easy to get dragged into Dina’s crazy. One minute you’re only going to dip your toes at the edge, just so you can grab her hand and pull her out; the next minute you’re full fathom five and flailing for air.

“I’m only telling you. It just happened.”

“Your partner’s sister,” I said. Suddenly I was exhausted, exhausted and sick to my stomach, something rising and burning in my throat. I leaned my head back against the wall and pressed my fingers into my eyes. “Your partner’s crazy sister. How could that seem OK?”

Richie said quietly, “It doesn’t.”

The dark behind my fingers was deep and restful. I didn’t want to open my eyes on that harsh, biting light. “And when you woke up this morning,” I said, “Dina was gone, and so was the evidence bag. Where had it been?”

A moment’s silence. “On my bedside table.”

“In plain view of anyone who happened to wander in. Flatmates, burglars, one-night stands. Brilliant, old son.”

“My bedroom door locks. And during the day I kept it on me. In my jacket pocket.”

All those arguments we’d had, Conor versus Pat, half-real animals, old love stories: Richie’s side had been bullshit. He had been holding the answer the whole time, close enough that I could have reached out and put my hand on it. I said, “And didn’t that work out well?”

“I never thought of her taking it. She-”

“You weren’t thinking at all. Not by the time she got into your bedroom.”

“She was your mate-or I thought she was. I didn’t think about her robbing stuff, specially not that. She cared about you, like a lot; that was obvious. Why would she want to fuck up your case?”

“Oh, no, no. She wasn’t the one who fucked up this case.” I took my hands away from my face. Richie was scarlet. “She swiped this envelope because she changed her mind about you, chum. And she’s not the only one. Once she spotted this, it struck her that you might not be the wonderful, trustworthy, stand-up guy she’d been picturing, which meant you might not in fact be the best person to take care of me. So she figured her only option was to do it herself, by bringing me the evidence that my partner had decided to run off with. Two for one: I get my case back, and I get to find out the truth about who I’m dealing with. Seems to me that, crazy or no, she was on to something.”

Richie, focusing on his shoes, said nothing. I asked, “Were you ever planning to tell me?”

That snapped him straight. “Yeah, I was. When I first found that yoke, I was, practically definitely. That’s why I bagged it and tagged it. If I hadn’t been planning on telling you, I could’ve just flushed it down the jacks.”

“Well, congratulations, old son. What do you want, a medal?” I nodded towards the evidence envelope. I couldn’t look at it; in the corner of my eye it seemed crammed tight with something alive and raging, a great insect thrumming against the thin paper and plastic, straining to split the seams and attack. “‘Collected in sitting-room, residence of Conor Brennan.’ While I was outside, on the phone to Larry. Is that right?”

Richie stared at the papers in his hand, blankly, like he couldn’t remember what they were. He opened his hand and let them scatter on the floor. “Yeah,” he said.

“Where was it?”

“Must’ve been on the carpet. I was putting back all that stuff that had been on the sofa, and this was hanging off the sleeve of a jumper. It wasn’t there when we took the clothes off the sofa-we gave them all a proper going-over, remember, in case any of them had blood on. The jumper must’ve picked it up off the floor.”

I asked, “What color jumper?” I already knew I would remember if Conor Brennan’s wardrobe had included rose-pink knitwear.

“Green. Khaki, like.”

And the carpet had been cream, with dirty green and yellow swirls. Larry’s lads could go over the flat with magnifying glasses, looking for a match to that wisp of pink, and find nothing. I had known, the moment I saw that fingernail, where the match was.

I asked, “And how did you interpret this find?”

There was a silence. Richie was looking at nothing. I said, “Detective Curran.”

He said, “The fingernail-the shape and the polish-it matches Jenny Spain’s. The wool that’s caught in it-” A corner of his mouth spasmed. “Looked to me like it matched the embroidery on the pillow that smothered Emma.”

The sodden thread that Cooper had fished out of her throat, while he held her frail jaw open between thumb and finger. “And what did you take that to mean?”

Richie said, evenly and very quietly, “I took it to mean that Jennifer Spain could be our woman.”

“Not could be. Is.”

His shoulders moved restlessly, against the door. “It’s not definite. She could’ve picked up the wool some other way. Earlier on, when she put Emma to bed-”

“Jenny keeps herself groomed. Not a hair out of place. You think she’d have left a broken nail to snag on things all evening, gone to bed with it still ragged? Left a piece of wool caught in it for hours?”

“Or it could’ve been a transfer off Pat. He gets the bit of wool on his pajama top when he’s using the pillow on Emma; then, when he’s struggling with Jenny, she breaks a nail, the wool catches in it…”

“That one specific fiber, out of the thousands and thousands in his pajamas, on his pajamas, in her own pajamas, all over the kitchen. What are the odds?”

“It could happen. We can’t just drop the whole thing on Jenny. Cooper was positive, remember? Her injuries weren’t self-inflicted.”

“I know that,” I said. “I’ll talk to her.” The thought of having to deal with the world outside this room felt like a baton to the back of the knees. I sat down heavily at the table; I couldn’t stand up any more.

Richie had caught that: I’ll talk to her, not We. He opened his mouth and then shut it again, looking for the right question.

I said, “Why didn’t you tell me?” I heard the raw note of pain, but I didn’t care.

Richie’s eyes fell away from mine. He knelt on the floor and started picking up the papers he had dropped. He said, “Because I knew what you’d want to do.”

“What? Arrest Jenny? Not charge Conor with a triple murder he didn’t commit? What, Richie? What part of that is so fucking terrible that you just couldn’t let it happen?”

“Not terrible. Just… Arresting her: I don’t know, man. I’m not sure that’s the right thing to do here.”

“That’s what we do. We arrest murderers. If you have a problem with the job description, you should’ve got a different fucking job.”

That brought Richie up on his feet again. “That right there, that’s why I didn’t tell you. I knew that was what you’d say. I knew it. With you, man, everything’s black and white. No questions; just stick to the rules and go home. I needed to think about it because I knew the second I told you, it’d be too late.”

“Damn right it’s black and white. You slaughter your family, you go to prison. Where the fuck are you seeing shades of gray?”

“Jenny’s in hell. Every second of her life, she’s going to be in the kind of pain I don’t even want to think about. You think prison’s going to punish her any worse than her own head? There’s nothing she can do, or we can do, to fix what she did, and it’s not like we need to lock her up to stop her doing it again. What’s a life sentence going to do here?”

Here I had thought it was Richie’s knack, his special gift: coaxing witnesses and suspects into believing, absurd and impossible though it was, that he saw them as human beings. I had been so impressed by the way he convinced the Gogans they were more than random irritating scumbags to him, the way he convinced Conor Brennan he was more than just another wild animal we needed to get off the street. I should have known, that night in the hide when we became just two guys talking, I should have known then and I should have seen the danger: it wasn’t an act.

I said, “So that’s why you were all over Pat Spain. And here I thought it was all in the name of truth and justice. Silly me.”

Richie had the grace to flush. “It wasn’t like that. At first I honestly thought it must’ve been him-Conor didn’t work for me, it didn’t look like there was anyone else. And then, once I saw that yoke there, I thought…”

His voice trailed off. I said, “The idea of arresting Jenny offended your delicate sensibilities, but you figured it might just be a bad idea to slap Conor in prison for life for something he didn’t do. Sweet of you to care. So you decided to find a way to dump the whole mess on Pat. That lovely little performance with Conor, yesterday: that’s where you were trying to take him. He almost bit, too. It must have ruined your day when he decided not to take the bait.”

“Pat’s dead, man. It can’t hurt him. I know what you said about everyone thinking he was a murderer; but you remember what he said on that board, about just wanting to take care of Jenny. If he had the choice, what do you think he’d pick? Take the blame, or put her away for life? He’d be begging us to call him a killer, man. He’d beg us on his knees.”

“And that’s what you were doing with the Gogan bitch, too. And with Jenny. All that bullshit about whether Pat was losing his temper more, was he having a nervous breakdown, were you afraid he’d hurt you… You were trying to get Jenny to throw Pat under a bus. Only it turns out a triple murderer has more sense of honor than you do.”

Richie’s face flared brighter. He didn’t answer. I said, “Let’s just say for one second that we do it your way. Throw that thing in the shredder, shove the blame on Pat, close the file and let Jenny walk out of the hospital. What do you figure happens next? Whatever went down that night, she loved her kids. She loved her husband. What do you think she’s going to do, the second she’s strong enough?”

Richie put the reports on the table, a safe distance from the envelope, and squared off the edges of the pile. He said, “She’s going to finish the job.”

“Yes,” I said. The light was burning the air, turning the room into a white haze, a jumble of incandescent outlines hanging in midair. “That’s exactly what she’ll do. And this time she won’t fuck it up. If we let her out of that hospital, inside forty-eight hours she’ll be dead.”

“Yeah. Probably.”

“How the hell are you OK with that?” One of his shoulders lifted in something like a shrug. “Is it revenge? She deserves to die, we don’t have the death penalty, what the hell, let her do it herself. Is that what you’re thinking?”

Richie’s eyes came up to meet mine. He said, “It’s the best thing left that could happen to her.”

I nearly came out of my chair and grabbed him by the shirt front. “You can’t say that. Jenny’s got how many years left, fifty, sixty? You think the best thing she can do with them is get in the bath and slice her wrists open?”

“Sixty years, yeah, maybe. Half of them in prison.”

“Which is the best place for her. The woman needs treatment. She needs therapy, drugs, I don’t know what, but there are doctors who do. If she’s inside, she’ll get all of that. She’ll pay her debt to society, get her head fixed, and come out with some kind of life in front of her.”

Richie was shaking his head, hard. “No, she won’t. She won’t. Are you crazy? There’s nothing in front of her. She killed her kids. She held them down till she felt them stop fighting. She stabbed her husband and then lay there with him while he bled out. Every doctor in the world couldn’t fix that. You saw the state of her. She’s already gone, man. Let her go. Have a bit of mercy.”

“You want to talk about mercy? Jenny Spain isn’t the only person in this story. Remember Fiona Rafferty? Remember their mother? Got any mercy for them? Think about what they’ve already lost. Then look at me and tell me they deserve to lose Jenny as well.”

“They didn’t deserve any of this. You think it’d be easier on them to know what she did? They lose her either way. At least this way it’ll be over and done with.”

“It won’t be over,” I said. Saying the words sucked my breath out, left me hollow, like my chest was folding in on itself. “It’s never going to be over for them.”

That shut Richie up. He sat down opposite me and watched his fingers square off the reports, again and again. After a while he said, “Her debt to society: I don’t know what that means. Tell me one person who’s better off if Jenny sits in prison for twenty-five years.”

I said, “Shut the hell up. You don’t even get to ask that question. The judge hands down sentences, not us. That’s what the whole bloody system is for: to stop arrogant little pricks like you from playing God, handing out death sentences whenever they feel like it. You just stick to the fucking rules, hand in the fucking evidence and let the fucking system do its job. You don’t get to throw Jenny Spain away.”

“It’s not about throwing her away. Making her spend years in this kind of pain… That’s torture, man. It’s wrong.”

“No. You think it’s wrong. Who knows why you think that? Because you’re right, or because this case breaks your heart, because you’re feeling guilty as hell, because Jenny reminds you of Miss Kelly who taught you when you were five? That’s why we have rules to begin with, Richie: because you can’t trust your mind to tell you what’s right and what’s wrong. Not on something like this. The consequences if you make a mistake are too huge and too horrible even to think about, never mind live with. The rules say we put Jenny away. Everything else is bullshit.”

He was shaking his head. “It’s still wrong. I’ll trust my own mind on this one.”

I could have laughed, or howled. “Yeah? Just look where that’s got you. Rule Zero, Richie, the rule to end all rules: your mind is garbage. It’s a weak, broken, fucked-up mess that will let you down at every worst moment there is. Don’t you think my sister’s mind told her she was doing the right thing when she followed you home? Don’t you think Jenny believed she was doing the right thing, Monday night? If you trust your mind, you will fuck up and you will fuck up big. Every single thing I’ve done right in my life, it’s been because I don’t trust my mind.”

Richie lifted his head to look at me. It took an effort. He said, “Your sister told me about your mother.”

In that second I almost punched his face in. I saw him brace for it, saw the blast of fear or hope. By the time my fists would unclench and I could breathe again, the silence had got long.

I said, “What exactly did she tell you?”

“That your mam drowned, the summer you were fifteen. When yous were down at Broken Harbor.”

“Did she happen to mention the manner of death?”

He wasn’t looking at me any more. “Yeah. She said your mam went into the water herself. On purpose, like.”

I waited, but he was done. I said, “And you figured that meant I was one strap away from a straitjacket. Is that right?”

“I didn’t-”

“No, old son, I’m curious. Go ahead and tell me: what was the line of thinking that led you to that conclusion? Did you assume I was so scarred for life that going within a mile of Broken Harbor was sending me off on some kind of psychotic break? Did you figure the crazy was hereditary, and I might suddenly get the urge to strip and start screaming about lizard people from the rooftops? Were you worried that I was going to blow my brains out on your time? I think I deserve to know.”

Richie said, “I never thought you were crazy. I never thought that. But the way you were about Brennan… That worried me, even before… before last night. I said it to you, sure. I thought you were overboard.”

I was itching to shove back my chair and start circling the room, but I knew if I got any closer to Richie I was going to hit him, and I knew that would be bad even if I was having trouble remembering why. I stayed put. “Right. So you said. And once you talked to Dina, you figured you knew why. Not just that: you figured you had a free hand to play about with the evidence. That sucker, you thought, that burnt-out old lunatic, he’ll never work this out himself. He’s too busy hugging his pillow and sobbing about his dead mummy. Is that right, Richie? Is that about the size of it?”

“No. No. I thought…” He caught a quick, deep breath. “I thought maybe we were gonna be partners for a good while, like. I know that sounds like, who do I think I am, but I just… I felt like it was working. I was hoping…” I stared him out of it until he let the sentence fall away. Instead he said, “This week, anyway, we were partners. And partners means if you’ve got a problem, I’ve got a problem.”

“That would be adorable, only I don’t have a fucking problem, chum. Or at least, I didn’t, up until you decided to get smart with evidence. My mother has nothing to do with this. Do you understand? Is that sinking in?”

His shoulders twisted. “I’m only saying. I figured maybe… I can see why you wouldn’t like the idea of Jenny finishing the job.”

“I don’t like the idea of people getting fucking killed. By themselves or anyone else. That’s what I’m doing here. That doesn’t require some deep psychological explanation. The part that’s begging for a good therapist is the part where you’re sitting there arguing that we should help Jenny Spain take a header off a tall building.”

“Come on, man. That’s stupid talk. No one’s saying to help her. I’m just saying… let nature take its course.”

In a way, it was a relief; a small, bitter one, but a relief all the same. He would never have made a detective. If it hadn’t been this, if I hadn’t been stupid and weak and pathetic enough to see just what I wanted to see and let the rest slide by, sooner or later it would have been something else. I said, “I’m not David fucking Attenborough. I don’t sit back on the sidelines and watch nature take its course. If I ever caught myself thinking that way, I’d be the one finding myself a tall building.” I heard the vicious flick of disgust in my voice and saw Richie flinch, but all I felt was a cold pleasure. “Murder is nature. Hadn’t you noticed that? People maiming each other, raping each other, killing each other, doing all the stuff that animals do: that’s nature in action. Nature is the devil I’m fighting, chum. Nature is my worst enemy. If it isn’t yours, then you’re in the wrong fucking gig.”

Richie didn’t answer. His head was down and he was running a fingernail over the table in tense, invisible geometric patterns-I remembered him doodling on the window of the observation room, like it had been a long, long time ago. After a moment he asked, “So what are you planning on doing? Just hand in that envelope to the evidence room like nothing ever happened, take it from there?”

You, not we. I said, “Even if that was how I roll, I don’t have the option. When Dina got here this morning, I wasn’t in yet. She gave this to Quigley instead.”

Richie stared. He said, like the breath had been punched out of him, “Oh, fuck.”

“Yeah: oh, fuck. Believe me, Quigley’s got no intention of letting this slide. What did I say to you, just a couple of days ago? Quigley would love a chance to throw the pair of us under a bus. Don’t play into his hands.”

He had gone even whiter. Some sadistic part of me, creeping out of its dark storeroom because I had no energy left to keep it locked away, was loving the sight of him. He asked, “What do we do?”

His voice shook. His palms were upturned towards me, like I was the shining hero who could fix this hideous mess, make it all go away. I said, “We don’t do anything. You go home.”

Richie watched me, uncertain, trying to work out what I meant. The cold room had him shivering in his shirtsleeves, but he didn’t seem to notice. I said, “Get your things and go home. Stay there till I tell you to come back in. You can use the time to think about how you’ll justify your actions to the Super, if you want, although I doubt it’ll make much difference.”

“What are you going to do?”

I stood up, leaning my weight on the table like an old man. “That’s not your problem.”

After a moment, Richie asked, “What’ll happen to me?”

It was one small thing to his credit, that this was the first time he had asked. I said, “You’ll be reverted back to uniform. You’ll stay there.”

I was still staring down at my hands planted on the table, but in my peripheral vision I could see him nodding, repetitive meaningless nods, trying to take in everything that that meant. I said, “You were right. We worked well together. We would have made good partners.”

“Yeah,” Richie said. The tide of grief in his voice almost rocked me on my feet. “We would.”

He picked up his sheaf of reports and got up, but he didn’t move towards the door. I didn’t look up. After a minute he said, “I want to apologize. I know that counts for fuck-all, at this stage, but still: I’m really, really sorry. For everything.”

I said, “Go home.”

I kept staring at my hands, till they slipped out of focus and turned into strange white things crouched on the table, deformed and maggoty, waiting to pounce. Finally I heard the door close. The light raked at me from every direction, ricocheted off the envelope’s plastic window to spike at my eyes. I had never been in a room that felt so savagely bright, or so empty.