Broken Harbour

18

There have been so many of them. Run-down rooms in tiny mountain-country stations, smelling of mold and feet; sitting rooms crammed with flowered upholstery, simpering holy cards, all the shining medals of respectability; council-flat kitchens where the baby whined through a bottle of Coke and the ashtray overflowed onto the cereal-crusted table; our own interview rooms, still as sanctuaries, so familiar that blindfolded I could have put my hand on that piece of graffiti, that crack in the wall. They are the rooms where I have come eye to eye with a killer and said, You. You did this.

I remember every one. I save them up, a deck of richly colored collector’s cards to be kept in velvet and thumbed through when the day has been too long for sleep. I know whether the air was cool or warm against my skin, how light soaked into worn yellow paint or ignited the blue of a mug, whether the echoes of my voice slid up into high corners or fell muffled by heavy curtains and shocked china ornaments. I know the grain of wooden chairs, the drift of a cobweb, the soft drip of a tap, the give of carpet under my shoes. In my father’s house there are many mansions: if somehow I earn one, it will be the one I have built out of these rooms.

I have always loved simplicity. With you, everything’s black and white, Richie had said, like an accusation; but the truth is that almost every murder case is, if not simple, capable of simplicity, and that this is not only necessary but breathtaking, that if there are miracles then this is one. In these rooms, the world’s vast hissing tangle of shadows burns away, all its treacherous grays are honed to the stark purity of a bare blade, two-edged: cause and effect, good and evil. To me, these rooms are beautiful. I go into them the way a boxer goes into the ring: intent, invincible, home.

Jenny Spain’s hospital room was the only one I have ever been afraid of. I couldn’t tell whether it was because the darkness inside was honed sharper than I had ever touched, or because something told me that it hadn’t been honed at all, that those shadows were still crisscrossing and multiplying, and this time there was no way to make them stop.

They were both there, Jenny and Fiona. Their heads turned to the door when I opened it, but no conversation cut off in mid-sentence: they hadn’t been talking, just sitting there, Fiona by the bedside in an undersized plastic chair, her hand and Jenny’s clasped together on the threadbare blanket. They stared at me, thin faces worn away in grooves where the pain was settling in to stay, blank blue eyes. Someone had found a way to wash Jenny’s hair-without the straighteners, it was soft and flyaway as a little girl’s-and her fake tan had worn away, leaving her even paler than Fiona. For the first time I saw a resemblance there.

“I’m sorry to disturb you,” I said. “Ms. Rafferty, I need a few words with Mrs. Spain.”

Fiona’s hand clamped tight around Jenny’s. “I’ll stay.”

She knew. “I’m afraid that’s not an option,” I said.

“Then she doesn’t want to talk to you. She’s not in any state to talk, anyway. I’m not going to let you bully her.”

“I don’t plan to bully anyone. If Mrs. Spain wants a solicitor to be present during the interview, she can request one, but I can’t have anyone else in the room. I’m sure you understand that.”

Jenny disengaged her hand, gently, and put Fiona’s on the arm of the chair. “It’s OK,” she said. “I’m fine.”

“No you’re not.”

“I am. Honestly, I am.” The doctors had dialed down the painkillers. Jenny’s movements still had an underwater quality and her face looked unnaturally calm, almost slack, as if some crucial muscles had been severed; but her eyes were focusing, and the words came out slow and thin but clear. She was lucid enough to give a statement, if I got her that far. “Go on, Fi. Come back in a bit.”

I held the door open till Fiona got up, reluctantly, and pulled her coat off the chair. As she put it on I said, “Please do come back. I’ll need to talk with you, as well, once your sister and I are done here. It’s important.”

Fiona didn’t answer. Her eyes were still on Jenny. When Jenny nodded, Fiona brushed past me and headed off down the corridor. I waited till I was sure she was gone before I closed the door.

I put my briefcase down by the bed, took off my coat and arranged it on the back of the door, pulled the chair so close to Jenny that my knees nudged her blanket. She watched me tiredly, incuriously, like I was another doctor bustling around her with things that beeped and flashed and hurt. The thick pad of bandage on her cheek had been replaced by a slim, neat strip; she was wearing something soft and blue, a T-shirt or a pajama top, with long sleeves that wrapped around her hands. A thin rubber tube ran from a hanging IV bag into one sleeve. Outside the window, a tall tree spun pinwheels of glowing leaves against a thin-stretched blue sky.

“Mrs. Spain,” I said. “I think we need to talk.”

She watched me, leaning her head back on the pillow. She was waiting patiently for me to finish and go away, leave her to hypnotize herself with the moving leaves until she could dissolve into them, a flicker of tossed light, a breath of breeze, gone.

“How are you feeling?” I asked.

“Better. Thanks.”

She looked better. Her lips were parched from hospital air, but the thick hoarseness had faded from her voice, leaving it high and sweet as a girl’s, and her eyes weren’t red any more: she had stopped crying. If she had been distraught, howling, I would have been less frightened for her. “That’s good to hear,” I said. “When are the doctors planning to let you go home?”

“They said maybe day after tomorrow. Maybe the day after that.”

I had less than forty-eight hours. The ticking clock, and the nearness of her, were hammering at me to hurry. “Mrs. Spain,” I said, “I came to tell you that there’s been some progress in the investigation. We’ve arrested someone for the attack on you and your family.”

That ignited a startled sputter of life in Jenny’s eyes. I said, “Your sister didn’t tell you?”

She shook her head. “You’ve…? Arrested who?”

“This may come as a bit of a shock, Mrs. Spain. It’s someone you know-someone you were very close to, for a long time.” The sputter caught, flared into fear. “Can you tell me any reason why Conor Brennan would want to hurt your family?”

“Conor?”

“We’ve arrested him for the crimes. He’ll be charged this weekend. I’m sorry.”

“Oh my God- No. No no no. You’ve got it all wrong. Conor would never hurt us. He’d never hurt anyone.” Jenny was struggling to lift herself off the pillow; one hand stretched towards mine, tendons standing out like an old woman’s, and I saw those broken nails. “You have to let him out.”

“Believe it or not,” I said, “I’m with you on this one: I don’t think Conor is a killer either. Unfortunately, though, all the evidence points to him, and he’s confessed to the crimes.”

“Confessed?”

“I can’t ignore that. Unless someone can give me concrete proof that Conor didn’t kill your family, I’ve got no choice but to file the charges against him-and believe me, the case will stand up in court. He’s going to prison for a very long time.”

“I was there. It wasn’t him. Is that concrete enough?”

I said gently, “I thought you didn’t remember that night.”

That only threw her for a second. “I don’t. And if it had been Conor, I’d remember that. So it wasn’t.”

I said, “We’re past that kind of game, Mrs. Spain. I’m almost sure I know what happened that night. I’m very sure that you do. And I’m pretty sure that no one else alive does, except Conor. That makes you the only person who can get him off the hook. Unless you want him convicted of murder, you need to tell me what happened.”

Tears started in Jenny’s eyes. She blinked them back. “I don’t remember.”

“Take a minute and think about what you’ll be doing to Conor if you keep that up. He cares about you. He’s loved you and Pat for a very long time-I think you know just how much he loves you. How will he feel, if he finds out you’re willing to let him spend the rest of his life in prison for something he didn’t do?”

Her mouth wobbled, and for a second I thought I had her, but then it set hard. “He won’t go to prison. He didn’t do anything wrong. You’ll see.”

I waited, but she was done. Richie and I had been right. She was planning her note. She cared about Conor, but her chance at death meant more to her than anyone left alive.

I leaned over to my briefcase, flicked it open and pulled out Emma’s drawing, the one we had found stashed away in Conor’s flat. I laid it on the blanket on Jenny’s lap. For a second I thought I smelled the cool harvest sweetness of wood and apples.

Jenny’s eyes slammed tight. When they opened she stared out the window again, her body twisted away from the drawing as if it might leap for her.

I said, “Emma drew this the day before she died.”

That spasm again, jerking her eyes closed. Then nothing. She gazed at the leaves turning the light, like I wasn’t there.

“This animal in the tree. What is it?”

Nothing at all, this time. Everything Jenny had left was going into shutting me out. Soon she wouldn’t hear me any more.

I leaned in, so close I could smell the chemical flowers of her shampoo. The nearness of her made the hairs on the back of my neck rise in a slow cold wave. It was like leaning cheek to cheek with a wraith. “Mrs. Spain,” I said. I put my finger on the plastic evidence envelope, on the sinuous black thing draped along a branch. It smiled out at me, orange-eyed, mouth wide to show triangular white teeth. “Look at the drawing, Mrs. Spain. Tell me what this is.”

My breath on her cheek made her lashes flicker. “A cat.”

That was what I had thought. I couldn’t believe I had ever seen it like that, as some soft, harmless thing. “You don’t have a cat. Neither do any of your neighbors.”

“Emma wanted one. So she drew one.”

“That doesn’t look like a cuddly house pet to me. That looks like a wild animal. Something savage. Not something any little girl would want snuggled up on her bed. What is it, Mrs. Spain? Mink? Wolverine? What?”

“I don’t know. Something Emma made up. What does it matter?”

“It matters because, from everything I’ve heard about Emma, she liked pretty things. Soft, fluffy, pink things. So where did she come up with something like this?”

“I don’t have a clue. School, maybe. On the telly.”

“No, Mrs. Spain. She found this at home.”

“No she didn’t. I wouldn’t let my kids near some wild animal. Go ahead: look through our house. You won’t find anything like that.”

I said, “I’ve already found it. Did you know Pat was posting to internet discussion boards?”

Jenny’s head whipped around so fast I flinched. She stared at me, eyes frozen wide. “No he wasn’t.”

“We’ve found his posts.”

“No you haven’t. It’s the internet; anyone can say they’re anyone. Pat didn’t go online. Only to e-mail his brother and look for jobs.”

She had started shaking, a tiny unstoppable tremor that juddered her head and her hands. I said, “We found the posts via your home computer, Mrs. Spain. Someone tried to delete the internet history, but he didn’t do a very good job: it took our lads no time to get the info back. For months before he died, Pat was looking for ways to catch, or at least identify, the predator living inside his walls.”

“That was a joke. He was bored, he had time on his hands-he was messing about, just to see what people online would say. That’s all.”

“And the wolf trap in your attic? The holes in your walls? The video monitors? Were those jokes too?”

“I don’t know. I don’t remember. The holes in the walls just happened, those houses are built from crap, they’re all falling to bits-the monitors, those were just Pat and the kids playing, just to see if-”

“Mrs. Spain,” I said, “listen to me. We’re the only ones here. I’m not recording anything. I haven’t cautioned you. Anything you say can never be used as evidence.”

Plenty of detectives take this gamble on a regular basis, betting that if the suspect talks once, the second time will come easier, or that the unusable confession will point them towards something they can use. I don’t like gambles, but I had nothing and no time to lose. Jenny was never going to give me a confession under caution, not in a hundred years. I had nothing to offer her that she wanted more than the sweet cold of razor blades, the cleansing fire of ant poison, the calling sea, and nothing to brandish that was more terrifying than the thought of sixty years on this earth.

If her mind had held even the smallest chance of a future, she would have had no reason to tell me anything at all, whether or not it could send her to prison. But this is what I know about people getting ready to walk off the edges of their own lives: they want someone to know how they got there. Maybe they want to know that when they dissolve into earth and water, that last fragment will be saved, held in some corner of someone’s mind; or maybe all they want is a chance to dump it pulsing and bloody into someone else’s hands, so it won’t weigh them down on the journey. They want to leave their stories behind. No one in all the world knows that better than I do.

That was the one thing I had to offer Jenny Spain: a place to put her story. I would have sat there while that blue sky dimmed into night, sat there while over the hills in Broken Harbor the grinning jack-o’-lanterns faded and the Christmas lights started to flash out their defiant celebrations, if that was how long it took her to tell me. As long as she was talking, she was alive.

Silence, while Jenny let that move around her mind. The shaking had stopped. Slowly her hands uncurled from the soft sleeves and reached out for the drawing on her lap; her fingers moved like a blind woman’s over the four yellow heads, the four smiles, the block-lettered EMMA in the bottom corner.

She said, just a thin thread of whisper trickling through the still air, “It was getting out.”

Slowly, so as not to spook her, I leaned back in my chair and gave her room. It was only when I moved back that I realized how hard I had been trying not to breathe the air around her, and how light-headed it had left me. “Let’s go from the beginning,” I said. “How did it start?”

Jenny’s head moved on the pillow, heavily, from side to side. “If I knew that, I could’ve stopped it. I’ve been lying here just thinking and thinking, but I can’t put my finger on it.”

“When did you first notice that something was bothering Pat?”

“Way back. Ages ago. May? The start of June? I’d say something to him and he wouldn’t answer; when I looked at him, he’d be there staring into space, like he was listening for something. Or the kids would start making noise, and Pat would whip round and go, ‘Shut up!’-and when I asked him what the problem was, because that totally wasn’t like him, he’d be like, ‘Nothing, just I should be able to get some bloody peace and quiet in my own home, that’s the only problem.’ It was just tiny stuff-no one else would have even noticed-and he said he was fine, but I knew Pat. I knew him inside out. I knew there was something wrong.”

I said, “But you didn’t know what it was.”

“How would I have known?” Jenny’s voice had a sudden defensive edge. “He’d said a few times about hearing scratching noises up in the attic, but I never heard anything. I thought probably it was a bird going in and out. I didn’t think it was a big deal-like, why would it be? I figured Pat was depressed about being out of work.”

Meanwhile, Pat had slowly turned more and more afraid that she thought he was hearing things. He had taken it for granted that the animal was preying on her mind too. I said, “Unemployment had been getting to him?”

“Yeah. A lot. We were…” Jenny shifted restlessly in the bed, caught her breath sharply as some wound pulled. “We’d been having problems about that. We never used to fight, ever. But Pat loved providing for all of us-he was over the moon when I quit working, he was so proud that he could afford for me to do that. When he lost his job… At first he was all positive, all, ‘Don’t worry, babes, I’ll have something else before you know it, you go buy that new top you were wanting and don’t worry for one second.’ I thought he’d get something, too-I mean, he’s good at what he does, he works like mad, of course he would, right?”

She was still shifting, running a hand through her hair, tugging harder and harder at tangles. “That’s how it works. Everyone knows: if you don’t have a job, it’s because you’re crap at what you do, or because you don’t actually want one. End of story.”

I said, “There’s a recession on. During a recession, there are exceptions to most rules.”

“It just made sense that he’d find something, you know? But things don’t make sense any more. It didn’t matter what Pat deserved: there just weren’t any jobs out there. By the time that started hitting us, though, we were pretty much broke.”

The word sent a hot, raw red creeping up her neck. I said, “And that was putting a strain on you both.”

“Yeah. Having no money… it’s awful. I said that to Fiona once, but she didn’t get it. She was all, ‘So what? Sooner or later, one of you’ll get another job. Till then, you’re not starving, you’ve got plenty of clothes, the kids don’t even know the difference. You’ll be fine.’ I mean, maybe to her and her arty friends, money isn’t a big deal, but to most of us out here in the real world, it actually does make a difference. To actual real things.”

Jenny flashed me a defiant look, like she didn’t expect the old guy to get it. I said, “What kind of things?”

“Everything. Everything. Like, before, we used to have people over for dinner parties, or barbecues in the summer-but you can’t do that if all you can afford to give them is tea and Aldi biscuits. Maybe Fiona would, but I’d’ve died of embarrassment. Some of the people we know, they can be total bitches-they’d have been like, ‘Oh my God, did you see the label on the wine? Did you see, the SUV’s gone? Did you see she was wearing last year’s stuff? Next time we come over, they’ll be in shiny tracksuits, living on McDonald’s.’ Even the ones who wouldn’t have been like that, they’d have felt sorry for us, and I wasn’t going to take that. If we couldn’t do it right, I wasn’t going to do it at all. We just didn’t invite people around any more.”

That hot red had filled up her face, turning it swollen-looking and tender. “And it wasn’t like we could afford to go out, either. So we basically stopped ringing people-it was humiliating, having this nice normal chat with someone and then, when they’d say, ‘So when do you want to meet up?’ having to come up with some excuse about Jack having the flu. And after a few rounds of excuses, people stopped ringing us, too. Which I was actually glad about-it made things way easier-but all the same…”

I said, “It must have been lonely.”

The red deepened, as if that was something shameful too. She tucked her head down so that a haze of hair hid her face. “It was, yeah. Really lonely. If we’d been in town then I could’ve met other mums at the park, stuff like that, but out there… Sometimes I went a whole week without saying a word to another adult except Pat, only ‘Thanks’ at the shop. Back when we first got married we were going out three, four nights a week, our weekends were always packed, we were popular; and now here we were, staring at each other like a pair of no-friends losers.”

Her voice was speeding up. “We were starting to bitch at each other about little things, stupid things-how I folded the washing, or how loud he had the telly. And every single thing turned into a fight about money-I don’t even know how, but it always did. So I figured that had to be what was bothering Pat. All that stuff.”

“You didn’t ask him?”

“I didn’t want to push him about it. It was obviously a big deal already; I didn’t want to make it even bigger. So I just went, Right. OK. I’m going to make everything lovely for him. I’m going to show him we’re fine.” Jenny’s chin came up, remembering, and I caught that flash of steel. “I’d always had the house nice, but I started keeping it totally perfect, like not a crumb anywhere-even if I was wrecked, I cleaned the whole kitchen before I went to bed, so when Pat came down for breakfast it’d be spotless. I’d take the kids picking wildflowers so we’d have something to put in the vases. When the kids needed clothes I got them secondhand, off eBay-nice clothes, but God, a couple of years ago I’d’ve died sooner than put them in secondhand stuff-but it meant I had enough money left to get decent food that Pat liked, steak for dinner sometimes. It was like, Look, everything’s OK, see? We can totally handle this; it’s not like we’re going to turn into skangers overnight. We’re still us.”

Probably Richie would have seen a spoiled middle-class princess whose sense of herself was too shallow to survive without pesto salad and designer shoes. I saw a frail, doomed gallantry that broke my heart. I saw a girl who thought she had built a fortress against the wild sea, braced at the door with all her pathetic weapons, fighting her heart out while the water seeped past her.

I said, “But everything wasn’t OK.”

“No. It so wasn’t OK. By, like, the beginning of July… Pat kept getting jumpier, and more-not even like he was ignoring me and the kids, exactly; like he forgot we existed, because there was something huge on his mind. He talked about the noises in the attic a bunch more times, he even rigged up this old video baby monitor, but I still didn’t connect it up. I just thought… guys with gadgets, you know? I thought Pat was just finding ways to fill up all that spare time. By that stage I did know it wasn’t just being out of work that was getting to him, but… He was spending more and more time on the computer, or hanging around upstairs on his own when I had the kids downstairs. I was scared that he was addicted to some kind of weird porn, or having one of those online affairs, or like sexting someone on his phone?”

Jenny made a sound halfway between a laugh and a sob, harsh and sore enough that it made me jump. “God, if only. Probably I should’ve copped on to the monitor thing, but… I don’t know. I had my own stuff on my mind, too.”

“The break-ins.”

An uncomfortable shift of her shoulders. “Yeah. Well, or whatever they were. They started around then-or I started noticing them, anyway. It made it hard to think straight. I was all the time looking for anything going missing, or anything moved, but if I actually spotted something, I worried that I was just being paranoid-and then I got worried that I was being paranoid about Pat, too…”

And Fiona’s doubts hadn’t helped. I wondered whether Fiona had sensed, deep down, that she was nudging Jenny further off balance, or whether it had been innocent honesty; whether anything within families is ever innocent.

“So I just tried to ignore it all and keep going. I didn’t know what else to do. I cleaned the house even more; the second the kids got something messy, I’d tidy it away, or wash it-I was mopping the kitchen floor like three times a day. It wasn’t just to cheer Pat up any more. I needed to keep everything perfect, so that if anything was ever out of place, I’d know straightaway. I mean”-a flash of wariness-“it wasn’t a big deal, or anything. Like I told you before, I knew it was probably Pat moving stuff and forgetting. I was just making sure.”

And here I had thought she was shielding Conor. It had never even occurred to her that he was involved. She was positive that she had been hallucinating; all she could think about was the nightmare chance that the doctors would find out she was crazy and keep her here. What she was protecting was the most precious thing she had left: her plan.

“I understand,” I said. Under cover of shifting position, I checked my watch: we had been there around twenty minutes. Sooner or later, Fiona-especially if I was right about her-wouldn’t be able to make herself wait any longer. “And then…? What changed?”

“Then,” Jenny said. The room was stifling and getting worse, but she had her arms wrapped around her body as if she was cold. “This one night, late, I went into the kitchen and Pat practically knocked the computer off the desk, trying to switch away from whatever he was doing. So I sat down next to him and I was like, ‘OK, you need to tell me what’s going on. I don’t care what it is, we can work through it, but I have to know.’ At first he was all, ‘Oh, everything’s fine, I’ve got it all under control, don’t worry about it.’ Of course that put me into a total panic-I was like, ‘Oh my God, what? What? Neither of us moves from this desk till you tell me what’s going on.’ And Pat, when he saw how scared I was, it just came pouring out of him: ‘I didn’t want to freak you out, I thought I could catch it and you’d never even have to know…’ And all this stuff about minks and polecats, and bones in the attic, and people online having ideas…”

That raw half-laugh again. “You know something? I was over the moon. I was like, ‘Wait, this is it? This is all that’s wrong?’ Here I’d been worrying about affairs and, I don’t know, terminal diseases, and Pat’s telling me we might have a rat or something. I practically burst into tears, I was so relieved. I went, ‘So we’ll ring an exterminator tomorrow. I don’t care if we have to get a bank loan, it’ll be worth it.’

“But Pat was all, ‘No, listen, you don’t understand.’ He said he’d already tried an exterminator, but the guy told him whatever we had was way out of his league. I was like, ‘Oh my God, Pat, and you just let us keep living here? Are you insane?’ He looked at me like a little kid who’s brought you his new drawing and you threw it in the bin. He went, ‘You think I’d let you and the kids stay if it wasn’t safe? I’m on it. We don’t need some exterminator guy messing around with poison and charging us a few grand. I’m going to get this thing.’”

Jenny shook her head. “I was like, ‘Um, hello? So far you haven’t even managed to get a look at it,’ and he went, ‘Well, yeah, but that’s because I couldn’t do anything that might tip you off. Now that you know, there’s all kinds of stuff I can do. God, Jen, this is such a massive relief!’

“He was laughing: flopped back in his chair, rubbing his head so his hair went all messy, and laughing. Personally I didn’t exactly see anything to laugh about, but still…” Something that might have been a smile, if it had been less crammed with sadness. “It was nice to see him like that, you know? Really nice. So I went, ‘What kind of stuff?’

“Pat leaned his elbows on the desk, all settled in like when we used to plan out a holiday or something, and he went, ‘Well, the monitor in the attic obviously isn’t working, right? The animal’s dodging it-maybe it doesn’t like the infrared, I don’t know. So what we have to do is think like the animal. See what I mean?’

“I went, ‘Totally not,’ and he laughed again. He went, ‘OK, what does it want? We’re not sure-could be food, warmth, even company. But whatever it is, the animal thinks it’s going to find it in this house, or it wouldn’t be here, right? It wants something that it thinks it’s going to get from us. So we have to give it the chance to get closer.’

“I was like, ‘Oh hell no,’ but Pat went, ‘No no no, don’t worry, not that close! I’m talking about a controlled chance. We control it, all the way. I rig up a monitor on the landing, pointing at the attic hatch, right? I leave the hatch open, but with wire mesh nailed over it, so the animal can’t get down into the house. We’ll keep the landing light on, so there’ll be enough light that I won’t need to use the infrared, in case that’s what’s scaring it away. And then we just have to wait. Sooner or later, it’s going to get tempted, it’s going to need to get closer to us, it’s going to head for the hatch-and boom-boom, caught on camera. See? It’s perfect!’”

Jenny’s palms turned up helplessly. “It didn’t exactly sound perfect to me. But, I mean… I’m supposed to support my husband, right? And like I said, this was the happiest he’d looked in months. So I went, ‘OK, fine. Off you go.’”

This story should have been gibberish, incoherent fragments gasped out between sobs. Instead, it was crystal clear. She was telling it with the same relentless, iron-willed precision that had forced her house to perfection every night, before she could sleep. Maybe I should have admired her control, or at least been grateful for it: I had thought, before that first interview, that Jenny dissolved in howling grief was my worst nightmare. This flat still voice, like a disembodied thing waking you deep in the night to whisper on and on in your ear, was much worse.

I said-I had to clear my throat before the words would come out-“When was this conversation?”

“Like the end of July? God-” I saw her swallow. “Less than three months. I can’t believe… It feels like three years.”

The end of July tallied with Pat’s discussion-board posts. I said, “Did you assume that the animal existed? Or did it occur to you, even just as a possibility, that your husband might be imagining it?”

Jenny said, sharply and instantly, “Pat’s not crazy.”

“I’ve never thought he was. But you’ve just told me he was under a lot of stress. In the circumstances, anyone’s imagination could get a little overactive.”

Jenny stirred restlessly. She said, “I don’t know. Maybe I wondered, sort of. I mean, I’d never heard anything, so…” A shrug. “But I didn’t even really care. All I cared about was getting back to normal. I figured once Pat put up the camera, things would get better. Either he’d get a look at this animal or he’d work out it wasn’t there-because it had gone somewhere else, or because it was never there to start with. And either way, he’d feel better because he was doing something and because he was talking to me, right? I still think that makes sense. That wasn’t a crazy thing to think, was it? Anyone would’ve thought that. Right?”

Her eyes were on me, huge with pleading. “That’s exactly what I would have thought,” I said. “But that’s not what happened?”

“Things got worse. Pat still didn’t see anything, but instead of just giving up, he decided the animal knew the monitor was there. I was like, ‘OK, hello, how?’ He was like, ‘Whatever it is, it’s not stupid. It’s very far from stupid.’ He said he kept hearing the scratching in the sitting room, when he was watching telly, so he figured the animal had got scared by the camera and worked its way into the walls. He was like, ‘That hatch is way too exposed. I don’t have a clue what I was thinking; no wild animal’s going to come out into the open like that. Of course it’s moved into the walls. What I really need to do is get a camera pointed inside the sitting-room wall.’

“I went, ‘No. No way,’ but Pat went, ‘Ah, come on, Jen, we’re only talking about a tiny little hole. I’ll put it out of sight, in by the sofa; you won’t even know it’s there. Just for a few days, maybe a week tops; just till we get a look at this thing. If we don’t sort it now, the animal could get stuck inside the walls and die there, and then I’d have to rip up half the place to get it out. You don’t want that, do you?’”

Jenny’s fingers tugged at the hem of the bedsheet, pleating it into little folds. “To be honest, I wasn’t all that worried about that. Maybe you’re right: maybe deep down I thought there was nothing there. But just in case… And it meant so much to him. So I said OK.” Her fingers were moving faster. “Maybe that was my mistake; that was where I went wrong. Maybe if I’d put my foot down right then, he’d have forgotten about it. Do you think?”

It felt like something scalding into my skin, that desperate plea, like something I would never be able to scrape off. I said, “I doubt he would have forgotten about it.”

“You think? You don’t think if I’d just said no, everything would have been OK?”

I couldn’t bear her eyes. I said, “So Pat made a hole in the wall?”

“Yeah. Our lovely house, that we’d worked like crazy to buy and keep nice, that we used to love, and now he was smashing it to pieces. I wanted to cry. Pat saw my face and he went, really grim, ‘What’s it matter? A couple more months and it’ll be the bank’s anyway.’ He’d never said anything like that before. Before, we’d both always been all, ‘We’ll find a way, it’ll be OK…’ And the look on his face… There was nothing I could say. I just turned around and walked out and left him there, hammering the wall. It fell apart like it was made out of nothing.”

I checked my watch again, out of the corner of my eye. For all I knew Fiona already had her ear pressed to the door, trying to work out whether to burst in. I shifted my chair even closer to Jenny-it made the hair at the top of my head lift-so she wouldn’t raise her voice.

She said, “And then the new camera didn’t catch anything, either. And a week later the kids and I got back from the shops and there was another hole, in the hall. I went, ‘What’s this?’ and Pat was like, ‘Give me the car keys. I need another monitor, quick. It’s moving back and forth between the sitting room and the hall-I swear it’s deliberately screwing with me. One more monitor and I’ve got the bastard!’ Maybe I could have put my foot down then, maybe that was when I should’ve done it, but Emma was all, ‘What? What? What’s moving, Daddy?’ and Jack was yelling, ‘Bastard bastard bastard!’ and I just wanted to get Pat out of there so I could sort them. I gave him the keys, and he practically ran out the door.”

A bitter little smile, one-sided. “More excited than he’d been in months. I told the kids, ‘Your daddy thinks we might have a mouse, don’t worry about it.’ And when Pat got back-with three video monitors, just in case, when Jack’s wearing secondhand jeans-I said to him, ‘You need to not talk about this around the kids, or they’ll get nightmares. I’m serious.’ He was all, ‘Yeah, course, you’re right as usual, no problem.’ That lasted, what, two hours? That same evening I was in the playroom, reading to the kids, and Pat came running in with one of those bloody monitors, going, ‘Jen, listen, it’s making this mad hissing noise in there, listen!’ I gave him the daggers but he didn’t even notice, not till I said, ‘We’ll talk about it later,’ and then he actually looked pissed off.”

Her voice was rising. I could have kicked myself for not bringing someone, anyone, even Richie, to stand guard outside the door. “And the next afternoon he’s on the computer and the kids are right there, I’m making their snack, and Pat goes, ‘Wow, Jen, listen to this! Some guy in Slovenia, he’s bred this giant mink, like the size of a dog, I wonder if one could’ve escaped and-’ And ’cause the kids were there I had to go, ‘That’s really interesting, why don’t you tell me about it later on,’ when inside I was just like, I don’t care! I don’t give a fuck! All I want is for you to shut up around the kids!”

Jenny tried to take a deep breath, but her muscles were too tense to let her. “So of course the kids figured it out-Emma did, anyway. A couple of days later we were in the car, her and me and Jack, and she was like, ‘Mum, what’s a mink?’ I went, ‘It’s an animal,’ and she went, ‘Is there one inside our wall?’

“I went, all casual, ‘Oh, I don’t think so. If there is, though, your daddy’s going to get rid of it.’ The kids seemed OK with that, but I could’ve hit Pat. I got home and told him-I was yelling, I’d sent the kids out to the garden so they wouldn’t hear-and Pat just went, ‘Oops, shit, sorry. Tell you what, though: now they know, maybe they could help. I can’t keep an eye on all these monitors at once, I keep worrying that I’m missing something. Maybe the kids could hang on to one each?’ Which was just so wrong I could hardly talk. I just went, ‘No. No. No bloody way. Don’t you ever suggest that again,’ and he didn’t, but still. And of course even though he said he had too many monitors he got nothing out of the hallway wall so he made more holes, he set up more monitors, every time I looked around there was another hole in our home!”

I made some meaningless reassuring noise. Jenny didn’t notice. “And that was all he did: watch those monitors. He got this trap-not just a mousetrap, but this massive horrible thing with teeth that he put in the attic-I mean, I guess you’ve seen it. He acted like it was some big mystery, he was all, ‘Don’t worry about it, babe, what you don’t know won’t hurt you,’ but he was totally over the moon with it, like this was a brand-new Porsche or some magic wand that was going to fix all our problems forever. He would’ve watched that trap twenty-four-seven if he could’ve. He wouldn’t play with the kids any more-I couldn’t even leave Jack with him while I took Emma to school, or I’d come home and find Jack, like, painting the kitchen floor with tomato sauce while Pat sat there, three feet away, staring at these little screens with his mouth open. I tried to get him to turn them off in front of the kids, and mostly he would, but that just meant the second the kids were in bed Pat had to sit in front of those things all evening long. A couple of times I tried making a fancy dinner, with candles and flowers and the nice silver, and dressing up-like a date night, you know?-but he just lined up the monitors in front of his plate and stared at them the whole time we were eating. He said it was important: the thing got hyper when it smelled food, he had to be ready. I mean, I thought we were important too, but no, apparently not.”

I thought of the frantic message-board posts, She doesn’t understand, she doesn’t get it… I asked, “Did you try telling Pat how you felt?”

Jenny’s hands flew up and out, the IV line swinging from that great purple bruise. “How? He literally wouldn’t have a conversation, in case he missed something on those fucking monitors. When I tried to say anything to him, even just asking him to get something off a shelf, he’d shush me. He’d never done that before. I couldn’t tell if I should give out, or if that would make Pat blow up at me, or pull away from me even more. And I couldn’t tell why I couldn’t tell-whether it was because I was so stressed out I wasn’t thinking straight, or whether there just wasn’t a right answer-”

I said soothingly, “I understand. I wasn’t implying-” Jenny didn’t stop.

“And anyway, we practically didn’t even see each other any more. Pat said the thing was ‘more active’ at night, so he was staying up late and sleeping half the day. We always used to go to bed together, always, but the kids get up early, so I couldn’t stay up with him. He wanted me to-he kept being like, ‘Come on, I know tonight’s the night we get a look at it, I can feel it’-he was always having some idea that was definitely going to catch the thing, like some new bait, or some tent-type thing over the hole and the camera so the animal would feel safe. And he’d be like, ‘Please, Jenny, please, I’m begging you-all it’ll take is one look and you’ll be so much happier, you won’t be worrying about me any more. I know you don’t believe me, but just stay up this one night and you’ll see…’”

“And did you?” I kept my voice low and hoped Jenny would take the hint, but hers looped higher and higher.

“I tried! I hated even looking at those holes, I hated them so much, but I thought if Pat was right then I owed it to him, and if he was wrong then I might as well be sure, you know? And either way, at least we’d be doing something together, even if it wasn’t exactly a romantic dinner. But I was getting so exhausted, a couple of times I thought I was going to fall asleep when I was driving; I couldn’t do it any more. So I’d go to bed at midnight, and Pat would come up whenever he got too tired to keep his eyes open. At first it was like two o’clock, but then it was three, four, five, sometimes not even then-in the morning I’d find him crashed out on the sofa, with all the monitors lined up on the coffee table. Or in the chair by the computer, because he’d spent the whole night online reading up on animals.”

I said, “‘If he was right.’ By this point, you had doubts.”

Jenny caught a breath and for a second I thought she was going to snap at me again, but then her spine sagged and she slumped back against the pillows.

She said quietly, “No. By then I knew. I knew there was nothing there. If there had been, how come I never heard anything? All those cameras, how come we never once saw anything? I tried to tell myself it could still maybe be real, but I knew. But by then it was too late. Our house bashed to bits, me and Pat hardly talking any more; I couldn’t remember the last time we’d even kissed, like properly kissed. The kids keyed up all the time, hyper, even if they didn’t understand why.”

Her head moved from side to side, blindly. “I knew I should do something, stop the whole thing-I’m not thick, I’m not insane; I did know that, by that stage. But I didn’t know what to do. There’s no self-help book for this; there’s no internet group. They didn’t tell us what to do about this on our marriage guidance course.”

I said, “You didn’t consider talking to anyone?”

That flash of steel. “No. No way. Are you joking?”

“It was a difficult situation. A lot of people might have felt that talking to someone would help.”

“Talking to who?”

“Your sister, maybe.”

“Fiona…” A wry twist of Jenny’s mouth. “Um, I don’t think so. I love Fi, but like I said before, there’s stuff she just doesn’t get. And anyway, she was always… I mean, sisters get jealous. Fi always felt like I had things easy; like stuff just fell into my lap, while she was working her arse off for everything. If I’d said something to her, part of her would’ve had to be like, Ha-ha, now you know how it feels. She wouldn’t’ve said it, but I’d’ve known. How would that have helped anything?”

“What about friends?”

“I don’t have those kind of friends, not any more. And, like, what would I say? Hi, Pat’s hallucinating some animal that lives in our walls, I think he’s going loop-the-loop? Yeah, right. I’m not stupid. Once you tell one person, it gets out. I told you, no way was I going to have people laughing at us-or, even worse, feeling sorry for us.” The thought had her chin out, ready for a fight. “I kept thinking about this girl Shona, we used to hang out when we were kids-she’s turned into a total bitch now. We’re not in touch any more, but if she’d heard about this, she’d have been on the phone to me like a shot. Whenever I got tempted to say something to Fi or whoever, that’s what I’d hear: Shona. Jenny! Hi! Oh my God, I heard Pat’s totally lost it, like he’s seeing pink elephants on the ceiling? Everyone’s just like, wow, who would’ve guessed? I remember we all thought you guys were the perfect couple, Mr. and Mrs. Boring, happy ever after… Like, how wrong were we? Gotta go, time for my hot stone massage, just had to say sooo sorry it all went tits-up for you! Byeee!”

Jenny was rigid in the bed, palms pressed down on the blanket, fingers digging in. “That was the one thing we still had going for us: nobody knew. I kept on telling myself over and over, At least we’ve got that. As long as people thought we were doing great, we had a chance of getting back up and doing great again. If people think you’re some kind of lunatic losers, they start treating you like lunatic losers, and then you’re screwed. Totally screwed.”

If that’s how everyone treats you, I had said to Richie, then that’s how you feel. How is that different? I said, “There are professionals. Counselors, therapists. Anything you said to someone like that would have been confidential.”

“And have him say Pat was nuts, and cart him off to some loony bin where he actually would have gone crazy? No. Pat didn’t need a therapist. All Pat needed was a job, so he wouldn’t have all this time to freak out about nothing, so he’d have to go to bed at a decent hour instead of…” Jenny shoved the drawing away, so violently that it fluttered off the bed, glided to rest by my foot with an ugly rasping sound. “I just had to hold things together till he could get a job again. That was all. And I couldn’t do that if everyone knew. When I’d pick up Emma from school, and her teacher would smile at me and be like, ‘Oh, isn’t Emma’s reading getting so much better,’ or whatever, just like I was a normal mummy going home to a normal house-that was the only time I felt normal. I needed that. That was the only thing getting me through. If she’d given me some awful sympathetic smile and a pat on the arm, because she’d found out that Emma’s daddy was in a nuthouse, I’d have curled up and died, right there on the classroom floor.”

The air felt solid with heat. For a stab of a second I saw me and Dina, maybe fourteen and five, me jerking her arm behind her back at the school gates: Shut up, you shut up, you don’t ever talk about Mum outside the house or I’ll break your arm- The high steam-whistle shriek out of her, and the stomach-turning free-fall pleasure of yanking her wrist higher. I leaned down to pick up the drawing, so I could hide my face.

Jenny said, “I never wanted all that much. I wasn’t one of those ambitious types who want to be a pop star or a CEO or an It girl. All I wanted was to be normal.”

All the force had ebbed out of her voice, leaving it drained and wan. I laid the drawing back on the bed; she didn’t seem to notice. “That’s why you didn’t send Jack back to preschool, isn’t it?” I said. “Not because of the money. Because he was saying he’d heard the animal, and you were afraid he’d say it there.”

Jenny flinched like I had raised a hand to her. “He kept on and on saying it! Back at the beginning of summer it was just once in a while, and it was only because Pat was encouraging him-they’d come downstairs and Pat would be all, ‘See, Jen, I’m not going loopy. Jack heard it just now, didn’t you, Jack the lad?’ And of course Jack would be like, ‘Yeah, Mummy, I heard the aminal in the ceiling!’ If you tell a three-year-old he’s heard something, and if he knows you want him to have heard it, then yeah, of course he’ll end up convinced that he did. Back then I didn’t even think it was a big deal. I just went, ‘Don’t worry about it, it’s only a bird, it’ll go out again in a minute.’ But then…”

Something jerked her body, so hard that I thought she was going to be sick. It took me a second to realize it had been a shudder. “Then he started saying it more and more. ‘Mum, the aminal went scratch scratch scratch in my wall! Mum, the aminal jumped up and down like this! Mum, the aminal, the aminal, the…’ And then this one afternoon in I guess August, towards the end of August, I took him over to play at his friend Karl’s house, and when I got back to pick him up, the two of them were in the garden, yelling and pretending to whack something with sticks. Aisling-that’s Karl’s mum-she said to me, ‘Jack was talking about a big animal that growls, and Karl said they should kill it, so that’s what they’ve been doing. Is that OK? You don’t mind?’”

That racking shudder again. “Oh, God. I thought I was going to faint. Thank God, Aisling took it for granted it was just something Jack had made up-she was just worried in case I thought she was encouraging them to be cruel to animals, or something. I don’t know how I got out of there. I took Jack home and I sat down on the sofa with him on my lap-that’s what we do for serious talks. I went, ‘Jack, look at me. Remember how we talked about the Big Bad Wolf not being real? This animal you told Karl about, it’s the same kind as the Big Bad Wolf: it’s makey-up. You know there’s no real animal, don’t you? You know it’s only pretend. Don’t you?’

“He wouldn’t look at me. He kept wiggling, trying to get down-Jack always hated staying still, but it wasn’t just that. I held onto his arms harder-I was terrified I was actually hurting him, but I had to hear him say yes. I had to. Finally he yelled, ‘No! It makes growls inside the wall! I hate you!’ And he kicked me in the stomach and pulled away, and ran.”

Jenny smoothed the blanket carefully over her knees. “So,” she said, “I rang the preschool and told them Jack wasn’t coming back. I could tell they thought it was the money-I wasn’t happy about that, but I couldn’t think of anything better. When Aisling rang after that, I didn’t answer the phone. She left messages, but I just deleted them. After a while she stopped ringing.”

“And Jack,” I said. “Did he keep talking about the animal?”

“Not after that. Once or twice, just little mentions, but the same way he’d talk about Baloo or Elmo, you know? Not like it was in his actual life. I knew that could be just because he could tell I didn’t want to hear it, but that was OK. Jack was only little. As long as he knew not to act like it was real, it didn’t matter so much whether he knew why. Once everything was over, he’d forget all about it.”

I asked, carefully, “And Emma?”

“Emma,” Jenny said, so gently, like she wanted to cup the word in her two hands and keep it safe from spilling. “I was so scared about Emma. She was still little enough that I knew she could end up believing in this thing, if Pat went on about it enough; but she wasn’t little enough that anyone would figure it was just a game, like Aisling did with Jack. And I couldn’t take her out of school, either. And Emma-when something upsets her, she can’t let go of it; she’ll stay upset for weeks and keep bringing it up over and over. If she started getting sucked in, I didn’t know what I was going to do. When I tried to think about it, my mind just blanked out.

“So when I was putting her to bed, that night in August after I talked to Jack, I tried to explain. I went, ‘Sweetie, you know that animal Daddy talks about? The one in the attic?’

“Emma gave me this quick little careful look. It totally broke my heart-she shouldn’t ever have to watch herself around me-but at the same time I was actually glad, that she knew to be careful. She went, ‘Yeah. The one that scratches.’ I went, ‘Have you ever heard it?’ and she shook her head and went, ‘No.’”

Jenny’s chest rose and fell. “The relief; Jesus, the relief. Emma’s not a great liar; I’d have known. I said, ‘That’s right. That’s because it’s not really there. Daddy’s just a little confused right now. Sometimes people think silly things when they’re not feeling great. Remember when you had the flu and you were calling all your dolls the wrong names, because everything got all mixed up in your head? That’s how Daddy’s feeling right now. So we just have to take good care of him and wait for him to get better.’

“Emma got that-she liked helping me take care of Jack when he was sick. She went, ‘Probably he needs some medicine and chicken soup.’ I went, ‘OK, we’ll try that. But if it doesn’t work straightaway, you know what’s the most important thing you can do to help? Not tell anybody. Not anybody at all, ever. Daddy’s going to get better soon, and when he does, it’s really important that no one knows about this, or they’ll think he was very silly. The animal has to be a family secret. Do you understand that?’”

Her thumb moved on the sheet, stroking, a tiny tender movement. “Emma went, ‘But it’s definitely not there?’ and I went, ‘Definitely definitely. It’s just a bit of silliness, and so we’re not going to talk about it, ever. OK?’

“Emma looked a lot happier. She snuggled down in her bed and went, ‘OK. Shhh.’ And she put her finger up to her mouth and smiled at me, over it-”

Jenny caught her breath, and her head whipped back. Her eyes were wild, ricocheting. I said, quickly, “And she didn’t mention it again?”

She didn’t hear me. “I was just trying to keep the kids OK. That was all I could do. Just keep the house clean, keep the kids safe, and keep getting up in the morning. Some days I didn’t think I was going to manage even that. I knew Pat wasn’t going to get better-nothing was going to get better. He’d stopped even applying for jobs, and anyway who’d hire him, in the state he was in? And we needed money, but even if I could’ve got work, how could I leave the kids with him?”

I tried to make some kind of soothing noise; I don’t know what came out. Jenny didn’t stop. “You know what it was like? It was like being in a blizzard. You can’t see what’s right in front of your face, you can’t hear anything except this white-noise roar that never lets up, you don’t have a clue where you are or where you’re heading, and it keeps just coming at you from every direction, just coming and coming and coming. All you can do is keep on taking the next step-not because it’ll actually get you anywhere, just so that you don’t lie down and die. That was what it was like.”

Her voice was ripe and swollen with remembered nightmare, like some dark rotten thing ready to burst. I said-for her sake or my own, I didn’t know and didn’t care-“Let’s move forward. This was August?”

I was just thin meaningless sounds, yammering at the rim of that blizzard. “I was having dizzy fits-I’d be going up the stairs and all of a sudden my head would be spinning; I’d have to sit down on the step and put my head on my knees till it went away. And I started forgetting stuff, stuff that had just happened. Like I’d say to the kids, ‘Get your coats on, we’re going to the shop,’ and Emma would give me this weird look and say, ‘But we went this morning,’ and I’d look in the cupboards and yeah, everything I thought we needed would be right there, but I still couldn’t remember anything-putting it there, or buying it, or even going out. Or I’d go to take a shower, and when I was taking off my top I’d realize my hair was wet: I’d just had a shower, like it had to be less than an hour ago, but I couldn’t remember it. I would’ve thought I was losing it, except I didn’t have room to worry about that. I couldn’t keep hold of anything except the second that was actually happening.”

In that moment I thought of Broken Harbor: of my summer haven, awash with the curves of water and the loops of seabirds and the long falls of silver-gold light through sweet air; of muck and craters and raw-edged walls where human beings had beat their retreat. For the first time in my life, I saw the place for what it was: lethal, shaped and honed for destruction as expertly as the trap lurking in the Spains’ attic. The menace of it left me blinded, sang like hornets in the bones of my skull. We need straight lines to keep us safe, we need walls; we build solid concrete boxes, signposts, packed skylines, because we need them. Without any of that to hold them down, Pat’s mind and Jenny’s had flown wild, zigzagging in unmapped space, tied to nothing.

Jenny said, “The worst part was talking to Fi. We always talked every morning; if I’d stopped, she’d have known something was wrong. But it was so hard. There was so much stuff to remember-like I had to make sure Jack was out in the garden or up in his room before she called, because I wasn’t about to tell her he wasn’t in preschool, so I couldn’t have her hearing him. And I had to try and remember what I’d said to her before-for a while I used to take notes while we talked, so I could have them there the next day and make sure I got it right, but I got paranoid about Pat or the kids finding them and wanting to know what the story was. And I had to sound cheerful all the time, even if Pat was conked out on the sofa because he’d been sitting there till five in the morning staring at a hole in the bloody wall. It was awful. It got…”

She swiped a tear off her face, absently, like someone batting at a fly. “It got to where I woke up dreading that phone call. Isn’t that terrible? My own sister that I love to bits, and I used to daydream about how I could pick some fight bad enough that she’d stop speaking to me. I’d have done it, except I couldn’t concentrate long enough to come up with anything.”

“Mrs. Spain,” I said, louder, putting a snap into my voice. “When did things reach this point?”

After a moment her face turned towards me. “What?… I’m not sure. It felt like I kept on going for ages like that, years, but… I don’t know. September? Sometime in September?”

I braced my feet hard against the floor and said, “Let’s move on to this Monday.”

“Monday,” Jenny said. Her eyes skidded away to the window and for a sinking second I thought I had lost her again, but then she drew a long breath and wiped off another tear. “Yeah. OK.”

Outside the window the light had moved; it fired the whirling leaves with a translucent orange glow, turned them into blazing danger-flags that made my adrenaline leap. Inside the air felt stripped of oxygen, as if the heat and the disinfectants had seared it all away, left the room dried hollow. Everything I was wearing itched fiercely against my skin.

Jenny said, “It wasn’t a good day. Emma got up on the wrong side of the bed-her toast tasted funny, and the tag in her shirt bothered her, and whine whine whine… And Jack picked up on it, so he was being awful too. He kept going on and on about how he wanted to be an animal for Halloween. I had a pirate costume all made for him, he’d been running around with a scarf round his head saying he was a pirate for weeks, but all of a sudden he decided he was going to be ‘Daddy’s big scary animal.’ He wouldn’t shut up about it, all day long. I was trying everything to distract him, giving him biscuits and letting him watch the telly and promising he’d get crisps when we went to the shop-I know I sound like a terrible mum, but he never gets that stuff normally; I just couldn’t listen to it, not that day.”

It was so homely, the anxious note in her voice, the little furrow between her eyebrows as she looked at me; so ordinary. No woman wants some stranger thinking she’s a bad mother for bribing her little boy with junk food. I had to hold back a shudder. “I understand,” I said.

“But he wouldn’t stop. In the shop, even, he was telling the girl at the till about the animal-I swear I would’ve told him to shut up, and I never do that either, only I didn’t want her to see me make a big deal of it. Once we got outside I wouldn’t say a word to Jack all the way home, and I wouldn’t give him his crisps-he howled so loud he nearly broke my and Emma’s eardrums, but I just ignored him. It was all I could do just to get us home without crashing the car. Probably I could’ve handled it better, only…” Jenny’s head turned uneasily on the pillow. “I wasn’t in great form either.”

Sunday night. To remind her of being happy. I said, “Something had happened. That morning, when you first came downstairs.”

She didn’t ask how I knew. The boundaries of her life had been turning ragged and permeable for so long, another invader was nothing strange. “Yeah. I went to put the kettle on, and right beside it, on the countertop, there was… there was this pin. Like a badge, like kids pin on their jackets? It said, ‘I go to JoJo’s.’ I used to have one like that, but I hadn’t seen it in years-I probably threw it away when I moved out of home, I don’t even remember. No way had it been there the night before. I’d tidied up, last thing; the place was spotless. No way.”

“So how did you think it had got there?”

The memory had her breathing faster. “I couldn’t think anything. I just stood there like an eejit, staring at it with my mouth open. Pat used to have one of them too, so I was trying to tell myself he must have found it somewhere and put it there for me to find, like a romantic thing, like to remind me about the good times, to apologize for how awful things had got? It’s the kind of thing he would’ve done, before… Only he doesn’t keep stuff like that either. And even if he had, it would’ve been in a box in the attic, and that stupid wire was still nailed over the attic hatch; how could he have got it down without me noticing?”

She was searching my face, scanning for any particle of doubt. “I swear to God, I didn’t imagine it. You can look. I wrapped the pin up in a piece of tissue-I didn’t even want to touch it-and stuck it in my pocket. When Pat woke up I was praying he’d say something about it, like, ‘Oh, did you find your present?’ but of course he didn’t. So I took it upstairs and folded it in a jumper, in my bottom drawer. Go look. It’s there.”

“I know,” I said gently. “We found it.”

“See? See? It was real! I actually…” Jenny’s face ducked away from mine for a second; her voice, when she started talking again, had a muffled sound to it. “I actually wondered, at first. I was… I told you what things had been like. I thought I could actually be seeing things. So I stuck the pin into my thumb, deep-it bled for ages. I knew I couldn’t be imagining that, right? All day, I couldn’t think about anything else-I went straight through a red light on the way to get Emma. But at least when I started getting scared that I’d hallucinated the whole thing, I could look at my thumb and go, OK, a hallucination didn’t do that.”

“But you were still upset.”

“Well, yeah, obviously I was. I could only come up with two answers, and they were both… they were bad. Either that same person had broken in again and left it there-except I checked the alarm, and it was on; and anyway, how would anyone know about JoJo’s? It would have to be someone who’d been stalking me, finding out everything about my whole entire life, and now they wanted me to know they knew-” She shuddered. “I felt like a crazy person even thinking about it. Stuff like that doesn’t happen, except in the movies. But the only other thing I could think of was that I actually still had my badge somewhere, and I had done the whole thing myself-gone and dug it out, put it down in the kitchen. And I didn’t remember anything about it. And that would mean…”

Jenny stared up at the ceiling, blinking to keep the tears back. “It’s one thing doing everyday stuff, autopilot stuff, and forgetting about it-going to the shop or taking a shower, things I would’ve done anyway. But if I was doing stuff like digging out that badge, crazy stuff that didn’t make any sense… then I could do anything. Anything. I could get up one morning and look in the mirror and realize I’d shaved my head or painted my face green. I could go to pick Emma up from school one day and find the teacher and all the other mums not talking to me, and I wouldn’t have a clue why.”

She was panting, working for each breath like the wind had been knocked out of her. “And the kids. Oh, God, the kids. How was I supposed to protect them, if I couldn’t tell what I was going to do the next second? How would I even know if I’d been keeping them safe or if I’d, I’d-I couldn’t even tell what I was scared of doing, because I wouldn’t know till it happened. Thinking about it made me want to get sick. It was like I could feel the pin upstairs, wiggling, trying to get out of the drawer. Every time I put my hand in my pocket, I was terrified I’d find it there.”

To remind her of being happy. Conor, floating in his cold concrete bubble, with nothing to moor him but the bright silent images of the Spains moving across their windows and the thick-twined anchor rope of his love for them: he had never dreamed that his gift might not do exactly what he wanted it to, that Jenny might not react the way he had planned; that, with all the best intentions in the world, he might smash down the frail scaffolding that kept her standing. I said, “So what you told me the first time we met, about that evening being an ordinary one-you and Pat giving the children their bath, and Pat making Jack laugh by playing with Emma’s dress: that wasn’t true.”

A wan, bitter half-smile. “God, that. I forgot I said that. I didn’t want you thinking we were… It should’ve been true. We used to do that, back before. But no: I washed the kids, Pat stayed down in the sitting room-he said he had ‘high hopes’ for the hole by the sofa. He had such high hopes, he hadn’t even eaten dinner with us, in case the hole did something amazing meanwhile. He said he wasn’t hungry, he’d get a sandwich or something later. Back when we were first married, we used to lie in bed and talk about someday when we had kids: what they’d look like, what we’d name them; Pat used to joke about how we’d all have family dinner round the table together every night, no matter what, even when the kids were horrible teenagers and they hated our guts…”

Jenny was still staring up at the ceiling and blinking hard, but a tear escaped, trickled down into the soft hair at her temple. “And now here we were, with Jack banging his fork on the table and yelling, ‘Daddy Daddy Daddy come here!’ over and over, because Pat was in the sitting room, still in his pajamas from last night, staring at a hole. And Emma with her fingers in her ears screaming at Jack to shut up, and me not even trying to make them both be quiet because I didn’t have the energy. I was just trying so hard to make it through the rest of the day without doing anything else insane. I just wanted to sleep.”

Me and Richie, on that first torch-lit walk-through, spotting the rumpled duvet and knowing someone had been in bed when it all turned bad. I said, “So you bathed the children and put them to bed. And then…?”

“I just went to bed too. I could hear Pat moving around downstairs, but I couldn’t face him-I couldn’t handle hearing all about what the animal was doing, not that night-so I stayed upstairs. I tried to read my book for a while, but I couldn’t concentrate. I wanted to put something in front of the drawer where the pin was, like something heavy, but I knew that would be a crazy thing to do. So in the end I switched off the light and I tried to go to sleep.”

Jenny stopped. Neither of us wanted her to go on. I said, “And then?”

“Emma started crying. I don’t know what time it was; I was dozing off and on, waiting for Pat to come up, listening out for what he was doing downstairs. Emma’s always had nightmares, ever since she was tiny. I thought that was all it was, just a nightmare. I got up and went in to her, and she was sitting up in bed, totally terrified. She was crying so hard she could barely breathe; she was trying to say something, but she couldn’t talk. I sat down on the bed and I hugged her-she was clinging on to me, sobbing her poor little heart out. When she calmed down a bit I said, ‘What’s wrong, sweetie? Tell Mummy and I’ll fix it.’ And she said…”

Jenny caught a deep, openmouthed gasp of breath. “She said… ‘It’s in my wardrobe, Mum. It was going to come get me.’

“I said, ‘What’s in your wardrobe, sweetie?’ I still thought it was just a dream or maybe a spider, she hates spiders. But Emma went, she went, ‘The animal. Mummy, the animal, it’s the animal, it’s laughing at me with its teeth-’ She was starting to go to bits again. I said, ‘There’s no animal here; it was just a dream,’ and she wailed, this awful high noise that didn’t even sound human. I grabbed her, I even shook her-I’ve never done that before, ever. I was scared she was going to wake Jack, but it wasn’t just that. I was…” That great gasp again. “I was scared of the animal. That it would hear her and come after her. I knew there was nothing there. I knew that. But I still-the thought of it, Jesus, I had to make Emma shut up before… She stopped wailing, thank God, but she was still crying and clutching at me, and she was pointing at her schoolbag-it was on the floor by her bed. All I could make out was ‘in there, in there,’ so I switched on the bedside lamp and dumped everything out of the bag. When Emma saw that…”

Jenny’s finger hovered over the drawing. “This. She went, ‘That! Mummy, that! It’s in my wardrobe!’”

The gasping was gone; her voice had stilled, slowed, just a small pinpoint of life scratching at the thick silence of the room. “The bedside lamp’s only little, and the paper was in a shadow. All I could see was the eyes and the teeth, in the middle of black. I said, ‘What is it, sweetie?’ But I already knew.

“Emma said-she was starting to get her breath back, but she was still doing that hiccuppy thing-she said, ‘The animal. The animal Daddy wants to catch. I’m sorry, Mummy, I’m so so sorry-’

“I put on my sensible voice and I went, ‘Don’t be silly. There’s nothing to be sorry for. But we’ve talked about that animal before. It isn’t real, remember? It’s just a game Daddy plays. He’s just a bit confused. You know that.’

“She looked so wretched. Emma’s sensitive; things she doesn’t understand, they just rip her up inside. She knelt up in bed and hugged me around the neck, and she whispered-right into my ear, like she was scared something would hear her-‘I see it. For days and days now. I’m sorry, Mummy, I tried not to…’

“I wanted to die. I wanted to just melt into a little puddle and soak away into the carpet. I thought I’d kept them safe. That was all I ever wanted. But that animal, that thing, it had got everywhere. It was inside Emma, inside her head. I would have killed it if I could have, I’d have done it with my bare hands, but I couldn’t do that because it didn’t exist. Emma was going, ‘I know I wasn’t meant to tell about it, but Miss Carey said draw your home and it just came out, I’m sorry, I’m sorry…’ I knew I had to get the kids away, but there was nowhere I could take them. It had escaped; it had got outside the house, too. There wasn’t anywhere left that was safe. And nothing I could do was worth anything, because I couldn’t trust myself to do things right any more.”

Jenny laid her fingertips on the drawing, lightly and with a kind of bleak wonder: this tiny thing, this slip of paper and crayon that had changed the world.

“I kept so calm. I said to Emma, ‘It’s all right, sweetie. I know you tried. Mummy’s going to make it all OK. You go to sleep now. I’ll stay right here so the animal can’t get you. OK?’ I opened her wardrobe and looked in all the corners, so she could see there was nothing there. I put all her things back in her schoolbag. Then I switched off the lamp again and I sat there on the bed, holding her hand, till she fell asleep-it took a while, she kept opening her eyes to double-check that I was still there, but she was exhausted from getting so freaked out; in the end she went off. And then I took the drawing and I went downstairs to find Pat.

“He was on the kitchen floor. He had the cupboard door open, this cupboard where he’d made a hole at the back, and he was crouching in front of it like an animal, like this great big animal waiting to pounce. He had one of his hands in the cupboard, spread out on the shelf. In the other hand he had this vase, this silver vase, it was our wedding present from my grandmother-I used to put it on the windowsill in our bedroom with pink roses in it, like I had in my bouquet, to remind us of our wedding day… Pat was holding it by the neck, holding it up like he was about to smash something with it. And there was this knife, one of these really sharp cooking knives that we bought back when we used to do Gordon Ramsay recipes, it was on the floor right next to him. I said, ‘What are you doing?’

“Pat said, ‘Shut up. Listen.’ I listened but I couldn’t hear anything, there was nothing there! So I said that: ‘There’s nothing there.’

“Pat laughed-he didn’t even look at me, he was just staring into this cupboard-and he said, he said, ‘That’s what it wants you to think. It’s right there, inside the wall, I can hear it, if you’d shut up for a second you’d hear it too. It’s smart, it keeps very quiet till I’m just about ready to give up and right then it does a quick little scrabble, just to keep me on my toes, it’s like it’s laughing at me. Well fuck that, I’m smarter than it is. I’m staying one step ahead. Yeah, so it’s got plans, but I’ve got plans too. I’m keeping my eye on the prize. I’m ready to rumble.’

“I go, ‘What are you talking about?’ and Pat goes-he’s hunched over towards me, practically whispering, like he thinks this thing can understand him-‘I finally figured out what it wants. It wants me. The kids too, and you, it wants all of us, but most of all it wants me. That’s what it’s after. No wonder I couldn’t catch it before, fucking about with peanut butter and hamburger- So here I am. Come on, motherfucker, I’m right here, come and get me!’ He’s like beckoning at the hole with the hand in the cupboard, like a guy trying to get another guy to go for him. He goes, ‘It can smell me, I’m so close it can practically taste me, and that’s driving it wild. It’s smart, all right, it’s careful, but sooner or later-no, sooner, I can feel it, any minute-it’s going to want me so bad that it can’t be careful any more. It’s going to lose control and it’s going to stick its head out of that hole and take a big bite of my hand and then I’ll grab it and bam bam bam not so smart now motherfucker not so smart now are you-’”

Jenny was shaking with the memory. “His face was all red, all covered in sweat, his eyes were practically popping out-he was smashing the vase down over and over, like he was hitting something. He looked insane. I yelled at him to shut up, I was like, ‘This has to stop, I’ve had enough, look at this, look-’ and I shoved this thing in his face.” She had both palms on the drawing, pressing it into the blanket. “I was trying to keep it down because I didn’t want to wake up the babies, I couldn’t let them see their dad like that, but I guess I was loud enough that at least I got Pat’s attention. He stopped waving the vase around and grabbed this and stared at it for a while, and then he was like, ‘So?’

“I said, ‘Emma drew that. She drew it in school.’ He was still looking at me like, ‘What’s the big deal?’ I wanted to scream at him. Pat and I don’t have screaming rows, we’re not like that-weren’t. But he was just squatting there looking at me like all this was totally normal, and it made me-I could barely even stand to look at him. I knelt down next to him on the floor, and I said, ‘Pat. Listen to me. You have to listen to me. This stops now. There’s nothing there. There never was anything there. Before the kids wake up tomorrow morning, you fill in every single one of these bloody holes, and I’ll take these bloody monitors down to the beach and I’ll throw them in the sea. And then we’ll forget this whole thing and we’ll never mention it again, ever ever ever.’

“I actually thought I’d got through. Pat put down the vase and he brought his bait hand out of the cupboard, and he leaned over and took hold of my hands, and I thought…” A quick breath that caught Jenny off guard, juddered her whole body. “They just felt so warm, his hands. So strong, just like always, just like they’ve always felt since we were teenagers. He was looking straight at me, properly-he looked like Pat again. For that one second, I thought it was OK. I thought Pat was going to give me a hug, a big long hug, and then we’d find a way to fix the holes together, and then we’d go to bed and sleep wrapped round each other. And someday, when we were old, we’d have a laugh about the whole insane thing. I actually thought that.”

The pain in her voice went so deep that I had to look away in case I saw it open up in front of me, a blackness gaping right down to the core of the earth. Bubbles in the magnolia paint on the wall. Red leaves rattling and scraping at the window.

“Except then Pat goes, ‘Jenny. My sweetheart. My lovely little missus. I know I’ve been a crap husband the last while. God, I totally know that. I haven’t been able to look after you, I haven’t been able to look after the kids, and you guys have stood by me while I sat here and let us fall deeper into the shite every day.’

“I tried to tell him it wasn’t about money, money didn’t even matter any more, but he wouldn’t let me. He shook his head and went, ‘Shhh. Hang on. I need to say this, OK? I know you don’t deserve to live like this. You deserve all the fancy clothes and expensive curtains in the world. Emma deserves dance lessons. Jack deserves tickets to Man U. And it’s been killing me that I can’t give you that stuff. But this, at least, this one thing, this I can do. I can get this little fucker. We’ll have it stuffed and mount it on the sitting-room wall. How’s that?’

“He was stroking my hair, my cheek, and he was smiling at me, actually smiling-he looked honest-to-God happy. Joyful, like the answer to all our problems was shining right there in front of him and he knew exactly how to catch it. He went, ‘Trust me. Please. I finally know what I’m doing. Our lovely house, Jen, it’s going to be all safe again. The kids, they’re going to be safe. Don’t worry, baby. It’s OK. I won’t let this thing get you.’”

Jenny’s voice was rocking wildly; her hands were fisted in the bedclothes. “I didn’t know how to say it to him: that was exactly what he was doing. He was letting this thing, this animal, this stupid insane imaginary it was never even there animal, he was letting it eat Jack and Emma alive. Every second he sat there staring at that hole, he was giving it another bite out of their minds. If he didn’t want it to have them, all he had to do was get up! Fix the holes! Put the bloody vase away!”

Her voice was so thick with damage and tears and rising hysteria, I could barely make out the words. Maybe someone else would have patted her shoulder and come out with the perfect thing to say. I couldn’t touch her. I took the glass of water from her bedside table and held it out. Jenny buried her face in it, choking and coughing, until she got some water down and the terrible noises subsided.

She said, down to the glass, “So then I just sat there next to him, on the floor. It was freezing cold, but I couldn’t get up. I was too dizzy, it was the worst it’s ever been, everything kept sliding and tilting. I thought if I tried to stand up I’d fall over face-first and smash my head on one of the cupboards, and I knew I couldn’t do that. I think we sat there for a couple of hours, I don’t know. I just held onto this thing”-the drawing, spattered with drops of water now-“and I stared at it. I was terrified that if I stopped looking at it even for a second, I’d forget it had ever existed, and then I’d forget that I needed to do something about it.”

She wiped at her face, for water or for tears, I couldn’t tell. “I kept thinking about that JoJo’s pin, up in my drawer. How happy we were back then. How that had to be why I’d dug it out of some box: because I was trying to find something happy. All I could think was How did we get here? I felt like there had to be something we had done, me and Pat, to make this happen, and if I could just find that, then maybe I could change it and everything would be different. But I couldn’t find it. I thought right back to the first time we kissed, when we were sixteen-it was on the beach in Monkstown, it was evening but it was summer so it was still bright and so warm, the warm air on my arms. We were sitting on a rock talking, and Pat just leaned over to me and… I went through every moment I could remember, every single one, but I couldn’t find anything. I couldn’t work out how we had ever got here, this kitchen floor, from where we started out.”

She had quieted. Behind the fine gold haze of hair, her face was still, turned inwards. Her voice was steady. I was the one who was afraid.

Jenny said, “Everything looked so weird. It felt like the light kept getting brighter, till it turned into searchlights everywhere; or like there had been something wrong with my eyes for months, some kind of haze blurring them up, and all of a sudden it was gone and I could see again. Everything looked so shiny and so sharp it hurt, and it was all so beautiful-just ordinary stuff like the fridge and the toaster and the table, they looked like they were made out of light, floating, like they were angel things that would blow you to atoms if you touched them. And then I started floating too, I was floating up off the ground, and I knew I had to do something fast, before I just drifted away through the window, and the kids and Pat were left there to get eaten up alive. I said, ‘Pat, we have to get out now’-at least I think I did, I’m not sure. He didn’t hear me, either way. He didn’t notice when I got up, didn’t even notice I was leaving-he was whispering something to that hole, I couldn’t hear what… Going up the stairs took forever because my feet weren’t touching the ground, I couldn’t move forward, I kept hanging there trying to go up in slow motion. I knew I should be scared that I wasn’t going to get there in time, but I wasn’t; I didn’t feel anything at all, just numb and sad. So sad.”

The thin bloodied thread of her voice, winding through the dark of that night to its monstrous heart. The tears had stopped; this place was far beyond tears. “I gave them kisses, Emma and Jack. I said to them, ‘It’s OK. It’s OK. Mummy loves you so much. I’m coming. Wait for me; I’ll be there as soon as I can.’”

Maybe I should have made her say it. I couldn’t open my mouth. The humming was a fretsaw whining at my skull; if I moved, breathed, I would split into a thousand pieces. My mind was flailing for something else, anything. Dina. Quigley. Richie, white-faced.

“Pat was still on the kitchen floor. The knife was right there beside him. I picked it up and he turned around and I stuck it into his chest. He stood up and he went, ‘What…?’ He was staring at his chest and he looked so amazed, like he couldn’t work out what had happened, he just couldn’t understand. I said, ‘Pat we have to go,’ and I did it again and then he grabbed me, my wrists, and we were fighting, all over the kitchen-he was trying not to hurt me, just hold me, but he was so much stronger and I was so scared he would get the knife away-I was kicking him, I was screaming, ‘Pat hurry we have to hurry…’ He was going, ‘Jenny Jenny Jenny’-he looked like Pat again, he was looking at me properly and it was terrible, why couldn’t he have looked at me like that before?”

O’Kelly. Geri. My father. I slid my eyes out of focus till Jenny was just a blur of white and gold. Her voice in my ears stayed mercilessly clear, that fine thread pulling me onwards, slicing deep.

“There was blood all over. It felt like he was getting weaker, but so was I-I was so tired… I went, ‘Please, Pat, please stop, we have to go find the kids, we can’t leave them alone there,’ and he just froze, stopped still in the middle of the floor and stared at me. I could hear us both breathing, these big ugly gasping noises. Pat said-his voice, Jesus, the sound in his voice-he went, ‘Oh, God. What did you do?’

“His hands had gone all loose on my wrists. I got away and I hit him with the knife again. He didn’t even notice. He started to head for the kitchen door, and then he fell over. He just fell. He was trying to crawl for a second, but he stopped.”

Jenny’s eyes shut for a second. So did mine. The one thing I had been hoping for Pat, the one thing that had been left to hope, was that he had never known about the children.

Jenny said, “I sat down beside him and I stuck the knife in my chest and then in my stomach, but it didn’t work-my hands were all, they were all slippy and I was shaking so hard and I wasn’t strong enough! I was crying and I tried my face and my throat and everywhere, but it was no good: my arms were like jelly. I couldn’t even sit up any more, I was lying on the floor, but I was still there. I… Oh, God.” The shudder galvanized her whole body. “I thought I was going to get stuck there. I thought the neighbors would have heard us fighting and called the cops, and an ambulance was going to come and… I’ve never been so frightened. Never. Never.”

She was rigid, staring into the folds and valleys of that worn blanket, seeing things. She said, “I prayed. I knew I didn’t have any right to, but I did anyway. I thought maybe God would strike me dead for it, but that was what I was praying for anyway. I prayed to the Virgin Mary; I thought maybe she might understand. I said the Hail Mary-I couldn’t remember half the words, it was so long since I’d said it, but I said the bits I could remember. I said Please, over and over. Please.”

I said, “And that’s when Conor arrived.”

Jenny’s head came up and she stared at me, confused, as if she had forgotten I was there. After a moment she shook her head. “No. Conor didn’t do anything. I haven’t seen Conor for, since, for years-”

“Mrs. Spain, we can prove he was in the house that night. We can prove that some of your wounds weren’t self-inflicted. That puts at least part of the attack on Conor. Right now, he’s going down for three murders and one attempted. If you want to get him out of trouble, the best thing you can do for him is tell me exactly what happened.”

I couldn’t get any force into my voice. It felt like a struggle underwater, slowed, weary; both of us were too drained to remember why we were fighting each other, but we kept going because there was nothing else. I asked, “How long did it take him to get there?”

Jenny was more exhausted than I was. Her fight ran out first. After a moment her eyes drifted away again, and she said, “I don’t know. It felt like ages.”

Out of the sleeping bag, down the scaffolding, over the wall, up the garden and turn the key in the back door: a minute, maybe two, tops. Conor must have been drowsing, wrapped snug and warm in his sleeping bag and in the certainty of the Spains’ lives sailing onwards below him, in their shining little boat. Maybe the fighting had woken him: Jenny’s muffled screams, Pat’s shouts, the faint bangs of overturning furniture. I wondered what he had seen when he leaned to the windowsill, yawning and rubbing his eyes; how long it had taken him to understand what was happening, and to realize that he was real enough to smash through the wall of glass that had held him away from his best friends for so long.

Jenny said, “He must have come in through the back door; I felt the wind on me when it opened. It smelled like the sea. He picked me up off the floor, my head, he pulled me into his lap. He was making this sound, like whining or moaning, like a dog that’s got hit by a car. At first I didn’t even recognize him-he’d got so thin and so white, and he looked so terrible; his face was all the wrong shapes, he didn’t even look like a human being. I thought he was something else-like an angel maybe, because I’d prayed so hard, or something awful that had come up out of the sea. Then he said, ‘Oh Jesus, oh Jenny, oh Jesus, what happened?’ And his voice was the same as always. The same as when we were kids.”

She made a vague motion towards her stomach. “He was pulling at me, here, at my pajamas-I guess he was trying to see… There was blood all over him but I couldn’t understand why, when I didn’t hurt anywhere. I went, ‘Conor, help me, you have to help me.’ At first he didn’t understand, he went, ‘It’s OK, it’s OK, I’ll get an ambulance,’ and he was trying to go for the phone, but I screamed. I grabbed hold of him and I screamed, ‘No!’ till he stopped.”

And the fingernail that had split as Emma fought for her life, that had snagged for an instant on the pink wool of her embroidered cushion, tore away in the thick weave of Conor’s jumper. Neither he nor Jenny had noticed-how could they? And later, at home, when Conor wrenched off his bloody clothes and threw them on the floor, he would never have seen that fragment falling away into the carpet. He had been blinded, seared, just praying that someday he would be able to see something other than that kitchen.

“I went, ‘You don’t understand. No ambulance. I don’t want an ambulance.’ He was going, ‘You’re going to be fine, they’ll get you fixed up in no time-’ He was holding me so tight-he had my face pressed into his jumper. It felt like it took me forever to get away enough that I could talk to him.”

Jenny was still watching nothing, but her lips were parted, loose as a child’s, and her face was almost tranquil. For her, the bad part was over; this had looked like a happy ending. “I wasn’t frightened any more. I knew exactly what needed doing, like it was all written out in front of me. The drawing was there on the floor, Emma’s awful drawing, and I said, ‘That thing there, take it away. Put it in your pocket and burn it when you get home.’ Conor jammed it into his pocket-I don’t think he even saw it, he just did what I said. If anyone had found it they could have guessed, like you guessed, and I couldn’t let anyone find out, could I? They’d think Pat was crazy. He didn’t deserve that.”

“No,” I said. “He didn’t.” But when Conor had found the drawing, later, at home, he hadn’t been able to burn it. This last message from his godchild: he had saved it, one final souvenir.

“Then,” Jenny said, “then I told him what I needed him to do. I said, ‘Here, here’s the knife, do it, Conor, please, you have to.’ And I shoved the knife into his hand.

“His eyes. He looked at the knife and then he looked down at me like he was afraid of me, like I was the most terrifying thing he had ever seen. He went, ‘You’re not thinking straight,’ but I was like, ‘Yes, I am. I am’-I was trying to scream at him again, but it came out just a whisper. I went, ‘Pat’s dead, I stabbed him and now he’s dead-’

“Conor went, ‘Why? Jenny, Christ, what happened?’”

Jenny made a painful scraping sound that could have been some kind of laugh. “If we’d had a month or two, then maybe… I just went, ‘No ambulance. Please.’ Conor went, ‘Wait. Hang on. Hang on,’ and he laid me down and crawled over to Pat. He turned Pat’s head and he did something, I don’t know what, tried to open his eyes or something-he didn’t say anything but I saw his face, I saw the look on his face, so I knew. I was glad about that, at least.”

I wondered how many times Conor had re-run those few minutes in his head, staring at the ceiling of his cell, changing a different tiny thing each time: If I hadn’t fallen asleep. If I had got up the second I heard noises. If I had run faster. If I hadn’t fumbled getting the key in the door. If he had made it into that kitchen just a few minutes earlier, he would have been in time to save Pat, at least.

Jenny said, “But then Conor-he started trying to stand up. He was trying to pull himself up on the computer desk-he kept falling back, like he was slipping on the blood or maybe he was dizzy, but I could tell he was aiming for the kitchen door. He was trying to go upstairs. I got hold of him, the leg of his trousers, and I went, ‘No. Don’t go up there. They’re dead too. I had to get them out.’ Conor-he just went down on his hands and knees. He said-he had his head down, but I heard him anyway-he said, ‘Ah, Jesus Christ.’”

Up until then he must have thought it was a domestic fight turned terrible, love transformed under all those tons of pressure into something diamond-hard that sliced flesh and bone. Maybe he had even thought it was self-defense, that Pat’s mind had boiled over at last and he had gone for Jenny. Once she told him about the children, there had been no place left for answers, for comfort, for ambulances or doctors or tomorrows.

“I went, ‘I need to be with the babies. I need to be with Pat. Please, Conor, please, get me out of here.’

“Conor made this coughing noise, like he was going to get sick. He said, ‘I can’t.’ He sounded like he was hoping this was all some kind of nightmare, like he was trying to find some way to wake up and make it all go away. I managed to get over closer to him-I had to drag myself, my legs had gone all numb and shaky. I got hold of his wrist and I went, ‘Conor, you have to. I can’t stay here. Please hurry. Please.’”

Jenny’s voice was fading, barely more than a hoarse flicker of sound; she was at the end of her strength. “He sat down beside me, and he turned my head so my face was against his chest again. He said, ‘It’s OK. It’s OK. Close your eyes.’ He was stroking my hair. I said, ‘Thank you,’ and I shut my eyes.”

Jenny spread her hands, palms up, on the blanket. She said simply, “That’s all.”

Conor had believed it was the last thing he would ever do for Jenny. And before he left, he had done two last things for Pat: wiped the computer, and taken the weapons. No wonder the delete job had been fast and messy; every second Conor stayed in that house had been shredding his mind. But he had known that if we read the flood of madness on that computer, and if there was no evidence that anyone else had been in the house, we would never look beyond Pat.

He must have known, too, that if he shoved it all onto Pat he would walk away safe, or at least safer. But Conor had believed the same thing I believed: you can’t do that. He had missed his chance to save the life that Pat should have had. Instead, he had put himself on the line to save those twenty-nine years from being branded with a lie.

When we came to get him, he had trusted in silence, in his gloves, in the hope that we couldn’t prove anything. Then I had told him that Jenny was alive; and he had done one more thing for her, before I could force the truth out of her. Probably a part of him had welcomed the chance.

Jenny said, “See? Conor only did what I wanted him to do.”

Her hand was struggling across the blanket again, reaching for me, and there was a flare of urgency in her voice. I said, “He assaulted you. By both of your accounts, he was trying to kill you. That’s a crime. Consent isn’t a defense to attempted murder.”

“I made him do it. You can’t put him in jail for that.”

I said, “That depends. If you testify to all of this in court, then yes, there’s an excellent chance Conor will walk away. Juries are only human; sometimes they bend the rules and go with their own consciences instead. Even if you give me an official statement, I can probably do something with that. But as it stands, all we’ve got to go on is the evidence and Conor’s confession. Those make him a triple murderer.”

“But he didn’t kill anyone! I told you what happened. You said, if I told you-”

“You told me your version. Conor told me his. The evidence doesn’t rule out either one, and Conor’s the one who’s willing to go on the record. That means his version carries a lot more weight than yours.”

“But you believe me. Right? If you believe me-”

Her hand had reached mine. She clutched my fingers like a child. Hers were so thin I could feel the bones moving, and terribly cold.

I said, “Even if I do, there’s nothing I can do about it. I’m not a layperson on a jury; I don’t have the luxury of acting on my conscience. My job is to follow the evidence. If you don’t want Conor going to jail, Mrs. Spain, then you need to be in court to save him. After what he did for you, I think you owe him that much.”

I heard myself: pompous, self-righteous, vapid, the kind of puffed-up little prick who spends his school days lecturing his classmates on the evils of alcohol and getting his head slammed into locker doors. If I believed in curses, I would believe that this is mine: when it matters most, in the moments when I know with the greatest clarity exactly what needs to be done, everything I say comes out wrong.

Jenny said-to the machines and the walls and the air, as much as to me-“He’ll be all right.”

She was planning her note again. “Mrs. Spain,” I said. “I understand a little of what you’re going through. I know you probably don’t believe me, but I swear on everything that’s holy, it’s the truth. I understand what you want to do. But there are still people who need you. There are still things you need to do. You can’t just let go of those. They’re yours.”

Just for a second, I thought Jenny had heard me. Her eyes met mine, startled and clear, as if in that instant she had caught a glimpse of the world still turning, outside this sealed room: children outgrowing their clothes and old people forgetting old hurts, lovers coming together and coming apart, tides wearing rock away to sand, leaves falling to cover seeds germinating deep in the cold earth. For a second I thought that, by some miracle, I had found the right words.

Then her eyes fell away and she twisted her hand out of mine-I hadn’t realized, until then, that I was squeezing it tight enough to hurt. She said, “I don’t even know what Conor was doing there. When I woke up in here, when I started remembering what happened, I thought probably he was never there at all; probably I’d imagined him. Right up until you said it today, I thought that. What was he…? How did he get there?”

I said, “He had been spending a bit of time in Brianstown. When he saw that you and Pat were in trouble, he came to help.”

I saw the pieces start falling into place, slowly and painfully. “The pin,” Jenny said. “The JoJo’s pin. Was that…? Was that Conor?”

I had too little mind left to figure out which answer was the most likely to hold her, or the least cruel. The second of silence told her. “Oh, God. And I thought…” A quick, high gasp, like a hurt child’s. “The break-ins, too?”

“I can’t go into that.”

Jenny nodded. That surge of fight had used up the last of her strength; she looked almost past moving. After a while she said quietly, “Poor Conor.”

“Yes,” I said. “I suppose so.”

We sat there for a long time. Jenny didn’t speak, didn’t look at me; she was done. She leaned her head back on the pillows and watched her fingers tracing the creases in the sheet, slowly, steadily, over and over. After a while her eyes closed.

In the corridor two women passed by talking and laughing, shoes clicking briskly on the tiled floor. My throat hurt from the dry air. Outside the window, the light had moved on; I didn’t remember hearing rain, but the leaves looked dark and drenched, shivering against a mottled, sulky sky. Jenny’s head fell to one side. Small ragged shudders caught at her chest, until gradually the ebb and flow of her breath smoothed them away.

I still don’t know why I stayed there. Maybe my legs wouldn’t move, or maybe I was afraid to leave Jenny alone; or maybe some part of me was still hoping that she would turn in her sleep and murmur the secret password, the thing that would unlock the code, magic the gibbering mess of shadows to black and white, and show me how all of this made sense.