Broken Harbour

3

Unromantic little secret: half of being a Murder D is managerial skills. Trainees picture the lone wolf heading off into the wild after shadowy hunches, but in practice, guys who don’t play well with others wind up in Undercover. Even a small investigation-and this wasn’t going to be small-involves floaters, media liaisons, the Tech Bureau and the pathologist and the world and his auntie, and you need to make sure that at any given second all of them are keeping you up to speed, no one’s getting in anyone’s way and everyone is working to your big plan, because the buck stops with you. That slow-motion silence inside the amber was over: the second we stepped out of the house, before we even stopped walking quietly, it was time to start people-wrangling.

Cooper, the pathologist, was outside the gate, tapping his fingers on his case and not looking happy. Not that he would have anyway: at his best Cooper is a negative little bastard, and he’s not at his best around me. I’ve never done anything to him, but for some reason all his own he doesn’t like me, and when an arrogant bollix like Cooper doesn’t like you, he does it right. One typo on a request form and he sends it back and makes me start over, and forget putting a rush on anything: my stuff waits its turn, urgent or not. “Detective Kennedy,” he said, flaring his nostrils like I smelled. “May I ask whether I resemble a waiter?”

“Not at all. Dr. Cooper, this is Detective Curran, my partner.”

He ignored Richie. “I am relieved to hear it. In that case, why am I waiting?”

He must have spent the delay coming up with that one. “I apologize,” I said. “There must have been some misunderstanding. Obviously I’d never waste your time. We’ll leave you to it.”

Cooper gave me a withering look that said he wasn’t falling for it. “We can only hope,” he said, “that you have managed not to contaminate the scene too extensively,” and he brushed past me, tugging his gloves more firmly into place, into the house.

No sign of my floaters yet. One of the uniforms was still hovering around the car and the sister. The other one was at the top of the road, talking to a handful of guys between two white vans: Tech Bureau, morgue. I said to Richie, “What do we do now?”

As soon as we got outside he had started jiggling again: whipping his head back and forth to check out the road, the sky, the other houses, drumming a little two-fingered tattoo on his thighs. The question stopped him. “Send the Bureau in?”

“Sure, but what are you planning on doing while they work? If we hang around asking ‘Are we there yet?’ we’ll just be wasting their time and ours.”

Richie nodded. “If it was up to me, I’d talk to the sister.”

“You don’t want to go see if Jenny Spain can tell us anything?”

“I figured it’s gonna be a while before she can talk to us. Even if…”

“Even if she makes it. You’re probably right, but we can’t take that for granted. We need to keep on top of it.”

I was already dialing my phone. The reception felt like we were in Outer Mongolia-we had to head down to the bottom of the road, clear of the houses, so I could get a signal-and it took a bunch of complicated back-and-forth calls before I got hold of the doctor who had admitted Jennifer Spain and got him convinced I wasn’t a reporter. He sounded young and viciously tired. “She’s still alive, anyway, but I can’t promise anything. She’s in surgery now. If she makes it through that, we’ll have a better idea.”

I hit speakerphone so Richie could get this. “Can you give me a description of her injuries?”

“I only examined her briefly. I can’t be sure-”

The sea wind whipped his voice away; Richie and I had to bend close over the phone. I said, “I’m just looking for a preliminary overview. Our own doctor will be examining her later, one way or the other. For now, all I need is a general idea of whether she was shot, strangled, drowned, you tell me.”

Sigh. “You understand this is provisional. I could be wrong.”

“Understood.”

“OK. Basically, she was lucky to make it this far. She has four abdominal injuries that look like knife wounds to me, but that’s for your doctor to decide. Two of them are deep, but they must have missed all the major organs and arteries, or she’d have bled out before she got here. There’s another injury to her right cheek, looks like a knife slash, straight through into the mouth-if she makes it, she’ll need considerable amounts of plastic surgery. There’s also some kind of blunt trauma to the back of the skull. X-ray showed a hairline fracture and a subdural hematoma, but judging by her reflexes there’s a decent chance she’s escaped without brain damage. Again, she was very lucky.”

Which was probably the last time anyone would ever use that word about Jennifer Spain. “Anything else?”

I could hear him swigging something, probably coffee, and swallowing a huge yawn. “Sorry. There could be minor injuries-I wasn’t looking for anything like that, my priority was getting her into surgery before we lost her, and the blood could have covered some cuts and contusions. There’s nothing else major, though.”

“Any signs of sexual assault?”

“Like I said, that wasn’t top priority. For what it’s worth, I didn’t see anything that would point that way.”

“What was she wearing?”

An instant of silence, while he wondered whether he had got it wrong and I was some specialized kind of pervert. “Yellow pajamas. Nothing else.”

“There should be an officer at the hospital. I’d like you to put her pajamas in a paper bag and hand them over to him. Make a note of anyone who touched them, if you can.” I had chalked up two more points for Jennifer Spain being a victim. Women don’t wreck their faces, and they sure as hell don’t go in their pajamas. They put on their best dresses, take time over their mascara and pick a method that they believe-and they’re almost always wrong-will leave them quiet and graceful, all the pain washed away and nothing left but cool pale peace. Somewhere in what’s left of their crumbling minds, they think that being found looking less than their best will upset them. Most suicides don’t really believe that death is all the way. Maybe none of us do.

“We gave him the pajamas. I’ll make the list as soon as I get a chance.”

“Did she recover consciousness at any stage?”

“No. Like I said, there’s a fair chance she never will. We’ll know more after the surgery.”

“If she makes it, when do you think we’d be able to talk to her?”

Sigh. “Your guess is as good as mine. With head wounds, nothing’s predictable.”

“Thanks, Doctor. Can you let me know straightaway if anything changes?”

“I’ll do my best. If you’ll excuse me, I have to-”

And he was gone. I put in a quick call to Bernadette, the squad admin, to let her know that I needed someone to get started on pulling the Spains’ financials and phone records, and put a rush on it. I was hanging up when my phone buzzed: three new voice messages, from calls that hadn’t got through the shitty reception. O’Kelly, letting me know he had wangled me a couple of extra floaters; a journalist contact, begging for a scoop he wasn’t going to get this time; and Geri. Only patches of the voice mail came through: “… can’t, Mick… sick every five minutes… can’t leave the house, even for… everything OK? Give me a ring when…”

“Shit,” I said, before I could bite it back. Dina works in town, in a deli. I tried to calculate how many hours it would be before I got anywhere near town again, and what the odds were of her making it that long without someone switching on a radio.

Richie cocked his head, questioning. “Nothing,” I said. There was no point in ringing Dina-she hates phones-and there was no one else to ring. I took a fast breath and tamped it down at the back of my mind. “Let’s go. We’ve kept the Bureau boys waiting long enough.”

Richie nodded. I put my phone away, and we headed up to the top of the road to talk to the men in white.

The Super had come through for me: he had got the Tech Bureau to send out Larry Boyle, with a photographer and a scene mapper and a couple of others in tow. Boyle is a round, pancake-faced little oddball who gives you the impression that he has a room at home packed with disturbing magazines, neatly alphabetized, but he runs a scene impeccably and he’s the best we’ve got on blood spatter. I was going to need both of those.

“Well, about time,” he told me. He was already in his white hooded boiler suit, with his gloves and overshoes hanging ready from one hand. “Who’s this we’ve got here?”

“My new partner, Richie Curran. Richie, this is Larry Boyle from the Bureau. Be nice to him. We like him.”

“Stop that carry-on till we see if I’m any use to you,” Larry said, batting a hand at me. “What’s in there?”

“Father and two kids, dead. The mother’s gone to hospital. The kids were upstairs and it looks like suffocation, the adults were downstairs and it looks like stabbing. We’ve got enough blood spatter to keep you happy for weeks.”

“Oh, lovely.”

“Don’t say I never did anything for you. Apart from the usual, I’m looking for whatever you can tell me about the progression of events-who was attacked first, where, how much moving around they did afterwards, what the struggle might have looked like. As far as we could see, there’s no blood upstairs, which could be significant. Can you check for us?”

“No problem to me. Any more special requests?”

I said, “There was something very weird going on in that house, and I’m talking about well before last night. We’ve got a bunch of holes in the walls, and no clue who made them or why-if you can find us any indications, fingerprints or anything, we’d be very grateful. We’ve also got a load of baby monitors-at least two audio and five video, going by the chargers on the bedside table, but there could be more. We’re not sure what they were for yet, and we’ve only located three of the cameras: upstairs landing, sitting-room side table, kitchen floor. I’d like photos of all of them in situ. And we need to find the other two cameras, or however many there are. Same for the viewers: we’ve got two charging, two on the kitchen floor, so we’re short at least one.”

“Mmm,” Larry said, with relish. “In-teresting. Thank God for you, Scorcher. One more bedsit overdose and I think I’d have died of boredom.”

“I’m thinking we could have a drug connection here, actually. Nothing definite, but I’d love to know if there are drugs in that house, or if there used to be.”

“Oh, God, not drugs again. We’ll swab anything that looks promising, but I’ll be only delighted if it turns up negative.”

“I need their mobiles, I need any financial paperwork you run across, and there’s a computer in the kitchen that’ll need going over. And give the attic a good once-over for me, will you? We haven’t been up there, but whatever was weird, it involved the attic somehow. You’ll see what I mean.”

“Now that’s more like it,” Larry said happily. “I love a bit of weird. Shall we?”

I said, “That’s the injured woman’s sister, in the uniforms’ car. We’re about to go have a chat with her. Can you hold off another minute, until we’ve got her out of view? I don’t want her seeing you guys heading in, just in case she loses the plot.”

“I have that effect on women. Not a bother; we’ll hang on here till you give us the nod. Have fun, boys.” He waved us good-bye with his overshoes.

Richie said grimly, as we headed back down the road towards the sister, “He won’t be so cheerful once he’s been inside that house.”

I said, “He will, though, old son. He will.”

I don’t feel sorry for anyone I run across via work. Pity is fun, it lets you have a great wank about what a wonderful guy you are, but it does bugger-all good to the people you’re feeling sorry for. The second you start getting gooey about what they’ve been through, your eye comes off the ball. You get weak. Next thing you know, you can’t get out of bed in the morning because you can’t face going in to work, and I have trouble seeing how that does anyone any good. I put my time and energy into bringing answers, not hugs and hot chocolate.

If I was going to feel sorry for someone, though, it would be the vics’ families. Like I said to Richie, ninety-nine percent of the vics have nothing to complain about: they got exactly what they went looking for. The families, about the same percentage of the time, never asked for anything like this kind of hell. I don’t buy the idea that it’s all Mummy’s fault if Little Jimmy turns into a junkie smack dealer dumb enough to rip off his own supplier. Maybe she didn’t exactly help him self-actualize, but my childhood left me with a few issues too, and did I wind up taking two in the back of the head from a pissed-off drug lord? I spent a couple of years seeing a counselor, to make sure those issues weren’t going to hold me back, and meanwhile I got on with things, because I’m a grown man now and that means my life is up to me. If I turn up one morning with my face blown off, that’s all mine. And my family, for no good reason in the world, would be left picking out shrapnel.

I watch myself hardest of all around the families. Nothing can trip you up like compassion.

When she left home that morning, Fiona Rafferty had probably been a good-looking girl-I like them taller and a lot more groomed, myself, but there was a fine pair of legs in those faded jeans, and she had a good head of glossy hair, even if she hadn’t taken the trouble to straighten it or to color it something snazzier than plain mouse brown. Now, though, she was a mess. Her face was red and swollen and covered in great streaks of snot and mascara, her eyes had turned piggy from crying and she had been wiping her face on the sleeves of her red duffle coat. At least she had stopped screaming, for the moment anyway.

The uniform was starting to look frayed around the edges, too. I said, “We need a word with Ms. Rafferty. Why don’t you get onto your station, have them send someone out to take her to the hospital when we’re done?” He nodded and backed away. I heard the sigh of relief.

Richie went down on one knee beside the car. “Ms. Rafferty?” he said gently. The kid had bedside manner. Maybe a little too much: his knee was smack in a muddy rut and he was going to be spending the rest of the day looking like he had fallen over his own feet, but he didn’t seem to notice.

Fiona Rafferty’s head came up, slowly and wavering. She looked blind.

“I’m very sorry for your trouble.”

After a moment her chin tilted down, a tiny nod.

“Can we get you anything? Water?”

“I need to ring my mam. How do I- Oh, God, the babies, I can’t tell her-”

I said, “We’re getting someone to accompany you to the hospital. They’ll let your mother know to meet you there, and they’ll help you talk to her.”

She didn’t hear me; her mind had already flinched off that and ricocheted somewhere else. “Is Jenny OK? She’s going to be OK, right?”

“We’re hoping so. We’ll let you know as soon as we hear anything.”

“The ambulance, they wouldn’t let me go with her-I need to be with her, what if she, I need to-”

Richie said, “I know. The doctors are looking after her, though. They know what they’re at, those lads. You’d only get in their way. You don’t want that, no?”

Her head rocked from side to side: no.

“No. And anyway, we need you to help us out here. We’ll need to ask you some questions. Would you be able for that now, do you think?”

Her mouth fell open and she gasped for air. “No. Questions, Jesus, I can’t- I want to go home. I want my mam. Oh, God, I want-”

She was on the verge of breaking down again. I saw Richie start to draw back, hands going up reassuringly. I said smoothly, before he threw her away, “Ms. Rafferty, if you need to go home for a little while and come back to us later on, we won’t stop you. It’s your choice. But for every minute we lose, our chances of finding the person who did this go down another notch. Evidence gets destroyed, witnesses’ memories get blurry, maybe the killer gets farther away. I think you should know that, before you make your decision.”

Fiona’s eyes were starting to focus. “If I… You could lose him? If I come back to you later, he could be gone?”

I moved Richie out of her eye line with a hard grip on his shoulder and leaned against the car door. “That’s right. Like I said, it’s your choice, but personally I wouldn’t want to live with that.”

Her face contorted and for a moment I thought she was gone, but she bit down hard on the inside of her cheek and pulled it together. “OK. OK. I can… OK. I just… Can I just take two minutes and have a cigarette? Then I’ll answer whatever you want.”

“I think you’ve made the right decision there. You take your time, Ms. Rafferty. We’ll be here.”

She pulled herself out of the car-clumsily, like someone standing up for the first time after surgery-and staggered off across the road, between the skeleton houses. I kept an eye on her. She found a half-built wall to sit on and managed to light her smoke.

Her back was to us, more or less. I gave Larry the thumbs-up. He waved cheerfully and came trundling towards the house, pulling his gloves on, with the rest of the techs trailing after him.

Richie’s crappy jacket wasn’t made for country weather; he was bouncing up and down with his hands in his armpits, trying not to look frozen. I said, keeping my voice down, “You were about to send her home. Weren’t you?”

He whipped his head around, startled and wary. “I was, yeah. I thought-”

“You don’t think. Not about something like that. Whether to cut a witness loose is my call, not yours. Do you understand?”

“She looked like she was about to lose it.”

“So? That’s not a reason to let her leave, Detective Curran. That’s a reason to make her pull it together. You almost threw away an interview that we can’t afford to lose.”

“I was trying not to throw it away. Better get it in a few hours’ time than upset her so bad we might not get her back till tomorrow.”

“That’s not how it works. If you need a witness to talk, you find a way to make her do it, end of story. You don’t send her home to have a bloody cup of tea and a biscuit and come back when it suits her.”

“I figured I should give her the choice. She just lost-”

“Did you see me putting handcuffs on the girl? Give her all the choice in the world. Just make damn sure she chooses the way you want her to. Rule Number Three, and Four and Five and about a dozen more: you do not go with the flow in this job. You make the flow go with you. Do I make myself clear?”

After a moment Richie said, “Yeah. I’m sorry, Detective. Sir.”

Probably he hated me right then, but I could live with that. I don’t care if my rookies take home photos of me to throw darts at, as long as when the dust settles they haven’t done any damage, either to the case or to their careers. “It won’t happen again. Am I right?”

“No. I mean, yeah, you’re right: it won’t.”

“Good. Then let’s go get that interview.”

Richie tucked his chin into his jacket collar and eyed Fiona Rafferty doubtfully. She was sagging on her wall, head almost between her knees, cigarette hanging forgotten from one hand. At that distance she looked like something discarded, just a crumple of scarlet cloth tossed away in the rubble. “You think she can take it?”

“I haven’t a clue. Not our problem, as long as she has the nervous breakdown on her own time. Now come on.”

I headed across the road without looking back to see if he was coming. After a moment I heard his shoes crunching on dirt and gravel, hurrying up behind me.

Fiona was a little more together: the occasional shudder still slammed through her, but her hands had stopped shaking and she had wiped the mascara off her face, even if it was with her shirt front. I moved her into one of the half-built houses, out of the stiff wind and out of view of whatever Larry and his buddies did next, found her a nice pile of breeze blocks to sit on and gave her another cigarette-I don’t smoke, never have, but I keep a pack in my briefcase: smokers are like any other addicts, the best way to get them on side is with their own currency. I sat next to her on the breeze blocks; Richie found himself a windowsill at my shoulder, where he could watch and learn and take notes without making a big deal of it. It wasn’t the ideal interview situation, but I’ve worked in worse.

“Now,” I said, when I’d lit her cigarette. “Is there anything else we can get you? An extra jumper? A drink of water?”

Fiona was staring at the cigarette, jiggling it between her fingers and dragging it down in fast little gasps. Every muscle in her body was clenched; by the end of the day she was going to feel like she’d run a marathon. “I’m fine. Could we just get this over with? Please?”

“No problem, Ms. Rafferty. We understand. Why don’t you start by telling me about Jennifer?”

“Jenny. She doesn’t like Jennifer-she says it’s prissy or something… It’s always been Jenny. Since we were little.”

“Who’s older?”

“Her. I’m twenty-seven, she’s twenty-nine.”

I had figured Fiona for younger than that. Partly it was physical-she was on the short side, slight, with a pointed face and small irregular features under all the mess-but partly it was the gear, all that student-type scruffiness. Back when I was young, girls used to dress that way even after college, but nowadays they mostly put on a better show. Going by the house, I was willing to bet that Jenny had made more of an effort. I said, “What does she do?”

“She’s in PR. I mean, she was, up until Jack was born. Since then she stays home with the kids.”

“Fair play to her. She doesn’t miss working?”

Something that could have been a head-shake, except Fiona was so rigid it looked more like a spasm. “I don’t think so. She liked her job, but she’s not super-ambitious, or anything. She knew she wouldn’t be able to go back if they had another baby-two sets of child care, she’d have been working for, like, twenty euros a week-but they still went for Jack.”

“Any problems at work? Anyone she didn’t get on with?”

“No. The other girls in the company sounded like total bitches to me-all these snide comments if one of them didn’t top up her fake tan for a few days, and when Jenny was pregnant they were calling her Titanic and telling her she should be on a diet, for God’s sake-but Jenny didn’t think it was a big deal. She… Jenny doesn’t like putting her foot down, you know? She’d rather go with the flow. She always figures…” A hiss of breath between her teeth, like physical pain had hit her. “She always figures things work out OK in the end.”

“What about Patrick? How does he get on with people?” Keep them moving, keep them jumping from topic to topic, don’t give them time to look down. If they fall, you might not be able to get them on their feet again.

Her face jerked towards me, swollen gray-blue eyes wide. “Pat’s-Jesus, you don’t think he did this! Pat would never, he would never-”

“I know. Tell me-”

“How do you know?”

“Ms. Rafferty,” I said, putting some stern into my voice. “Do you want to help us here?”

“Of course I-”

“Good. Then you need to focus on the questions we’re asking. The sooner we get some answers, the sooner you get some answers. OK?”

Fiona looked around wildly, like the room would vanish any second and she would wake up. It was bare concrete and sloppy mortar, with a couple of wooden beams propped against one wall like they were holding it up. A stack of fake-oak banisters covered in a thick coating of grime, flattened Styrofoam cups on the floor, a muddy blue sweatshirt balled up in one corner: it looked like an archaeological site frozen in the moment when the inhabitants had dropped everything and fled, from some natural disaster or some invading force. Fiona couldn’t see the place now, but it was going to be stamped on her mind for the rest of her life. This is one of the little extras murder throws at the families: long after you lose hold of the victim’s face or the last words she said to you, you remember every detail of the nightmare limbo where this thing came clawing into your life.

“Ms. Rafferty,” I said. “We can’t afford to waste time.”

“Yeah. I’m OK.” She jammed out her cigarette on the breeze blocks and stared at the butt like it had materialized in her hand out of nowhere. Richie leaned forward, holding out a foam cup, and said quietly, “Here.” Fiona nodded jerkily; she dropped in her cigarette and kept hold of the cup, gripping it with both hands.

I asked, “So what’s Patrick like?”

“He’s lovely.” Defiant flash of red-rimmed eyes. Under the wreckage was plenty of stubborn. “We’ve known him forever-we’re all from Monkstown, we always hung out with the same crowd, ever since we were kids. Him and Jenny, they’ve been together since they were sixteen.”

“What kind of relationship was it?”

“They were mad about each other. The rest of the gang, we thought it was a big deal if we went out with someone for more than a few weeks, but Pat and Jenny were…” Fiona caught a deep breath and jerked her head back, staring up through the empty stairwell and the haphazard beams at the gray sky. “They knew straightaway that this was it. It used to make them seem older; grown-up. The rest of us were just messing about, just playing, you know? Pat and Jenny were doing the real thing. Love.”

The real thing has got more people killed than practically anything else I can think of. “When did they get engaged?”

“When they were nineteen. Valentine’s Day.”

“That’s pretty young, these days. What did your parents think?”

“They were delighted! They love Pat too. They just said to wait till they finished college, and Pat and Jenny were fine with that. They got married when they were twenty-two. Jenny said there wasn’t any point in putting it off any longer, it wasn’t like they were going to change their minds.”

“And how did it work out?”

“It’s worked out great. Pat, the way he treats Jenny-he still lights up when he finds out there’s something she wants, because he can’t wait to get it for her. Back when I was a teenager, I used to pray that I’d meet someone who’d love me the way Pat loves Jenny. OK?”

The present tense takes a long time to wear off. My mother died way back when I was a teenager, but every now and then Dina still talks about what perfume Mummy wears or what kind of ice cream she likes. It drives Geri crazy. I asked, not too skeptically, “No arguments? In thirteen years?”

“That’s not what I said. Everyone has arguments. But theirs aren’t a big deal.”

“What do they argue about?”

Fiona was looking at me now, a thin layer of wariness solidifying over all the rest. “Same as any couple. Stuff like, back when we were kids, Pat would get upset if some other guy fancied Jenny. Or when they were saving up towards the house, Pat wanted to go on holiday and Jenny thought everything should go into the savings. They always sort it out, though. Like I said, no big deal.”

Money: the only thing that kills more people than love. “What does Patrick do?”

“He’s in recruitment-was. He worked for Nolan and Roberts-they find people for financial services. They let him go in February.”

“Any particular reason?”

Fiona’s shoulders were starting to tense up again. “It wasn’t anything he did. They let a few people go at the same time, not just him. Financial services companies aren’t exactly recruiting these days, you know? The recession… ”

“Did he have any problems at work? Any bad blood when he left?”

“No! You keep trying to make it sound like, like Pat and Jenny have all these enemies everywhere, they’re fighting all the time- They’re not like that.”

She was reared back away from me, the cup thrust out in two clenched hands like a shield. I said soothingly, “Now, that’s the kind of information I need. I don’t know Pat and Jenny; I’m just trying to get an idea of them.”

“They’re lovely. People like them. They love each other. They love the kids. OK? Does that give you enough of an idea?”

Actually that gave me shag-all idea about anything, but it was obviously the best I was going to get. “Absolutely,” I said. “I appreciate it. Does Patrick’s family still live in Monkstown?”

“His parents are dead-his dad was back when we were kids, his mum was a few years ago. He’s got a little brother, Ian, he’s in Chicago- Ring Ian. Ask him about Pat and Jenny. He’ll tell you the exact same thing.”

“I’m sure he will. Did Pat and Jenny keep any valuables in the house? Cash, jewelry, anything like that?”

Fiona’s shoulders came down again, a little, while she considered that. “Jenny’s engagement ring-Pat paid a couple of grand for that-and this emerald ring that our granny left to Emma. And Pat has a computer; it’s pretty new, he got it with his redundancy money, it might still be worth something… All that stuff, is it still there? Or did it get taken?”

“We’ll check. That’s it for valuables?”

“They don’t have anything valuable. They used to have this big SUV, but they had to give it back; they couldn’t make the repayments. And I guess there’s Jenny’s clothes-she used to spend a load on them, till Pat lost his job-but who’s going to do this for a bunch of secondhand clothes?”

There are people who would do it for a lot less, but I didn’t get the feeling that was what we were looking at. “When did you last see them?”

She had to think about that. “I met up with Jenny in Dublin, for coffee. This summer, maybe three or four months ago? I haven’t seen Pat in ages-April, I guess. God, I don’t know how it got to be that long-”

“What about the children?”

“April, the same as Pat. I was out here for Emma’s birthday-she was turning six.”

“Did you notice anything out of the ordinary?”

“Like what?”

Head up, chin out, straight onto the defensive. I said, “Anything at all. A guest who seemed out of place, maybe. A conversation that sounded odd.”

“No. Nothing was odd. There were a bunch of kids from Emma’s class, and Jenny got a bouncy castle- Oh, God, Emma and Jack… Both of them, are you sure they’re both…? Could one of them not be just hurt, just, just… ”

“Ms. Rafferty,” I said, in my best gentle-but-firm, “I’m pretty sure they’re not just hurt. We’ll let you know straightaway if anything changes, but right now I need you to stay with me. Every second counts, remember?”

Fiona pressed a hand over her mouth and swallowed hard. “Yeah.”

“Well done.” I held out another cigarette and clicked the lighter. “When did you last speak to Jenny?”

“Yesterday morning.” She didn’t have to think about that one. “I ring her every morning at half past eight, once I’m in work. We have our coffee and check in, just for a few minutes. Like a start to the day, you know?”

“It sounds nice. How was she yesterday?”

“Normal! She was completely normal! There was nothing, I swear to God, I’ve gone over it in my head and there was nothing-”

“I’m sure there wasn’t,” I said soothingly. “What did you talk about?”

“Just stuff, I don’t know. One of my flatmates plays bass, her band has a gig coming up, I told Jenny about that; she was telling me how she was looking online for a toy stegosaurus, because Jack had brought home some friend from preschool on Friday and they went hunting a stegosaurus in the garden… She sounded fine. Totally fine.”

“Would she have told you if there was anything wrong?”

“Yeah, I think so. She would. I’m sure she would.”

Which didn’t sound sure. I asked, “Are you two close?”

Fiona said, “There’s just the two of us.” She heard herself and realized that wasn’t an answer. “Yeah. We’re close. I mean, we were closer when we were younger, teenagers-we sort of went in different directions after that. And it’s not as easy now that Jenny’s out here.”

“How long has that been?”

“They bought the house like three years ago.” 2006: the height of the boom. Whatever they had paid, these days the gaff was worth half of that. “There was nothing here then, though, just fields; they bought off the plans. I thought they were mental, but Jenny was over the moon, she was so excited-their own place…” Fiona’s mouth contorted, but she got it back together. “They moved out here maybe a year later. As soon as the house was finished.”

I asked, “And what about you? Where do you live?”

“In Dublin. Ranelagh.”

“You said you share a flat?”

“Yeah. Me and two other girls.”

“What do you do?”

“I’m a photographer. I’m trying to get an exhibition together, but meanwhile I work at Studio Pierre-you know, Pierre, he was on that TV show about elite Irish weddings? I mostly do the baby shoots, or if Keith-Pierre-gets two weddings on the same day, I do one of them.”

“Were you doing a baby shoot this morning?”

She had to work to remember, it was so far away. “No. I was going through shots, these shots from last week-the mother’s coming in today to pick the album.”

“What time did you leave?”

“Like quarter past nine. One of the guys said he’d sort out the album for me.”

“Where’s Studio Pierre?”

“By Phoenix Park.”

An hour from Broken Harbor, minimum, in morning traffic and in that shitty little car. I asked, “Had you been worried about Jenny?”

That electric-shock head-shake.

“Are you sure? That’s an awful lot of hassle to go to because someone doesn’t answer her phone.”

A tense shrug. Fiona balanced the foam cup carefully beside her, tapped ash. “I wanted to make sure she was OK.”

“Why wouldn’t she have been?”

“Because. We always talk. Every day, for years. And I was right, wasn’t I? She wasn’t OK.”

Her chin wobbled. I leaned in close to give her a tissue, didn’t lean back. “Ms. Rafferty,” I said. “We both know there was more to it than that. You don’t ditch work, possibly annoy a client, and drive for an hour, just because your sister’s out of touch for forty-five minutes. You could have assumed that she’d gone to bed with a migraine, or that she’d lost her phone, or that the kids had come down with the flu, or any one of several hundred things, all of them a lot more likely than this. Instead, you jumped straight to the conclusion that something was wrong. You need to tell me why.”

Fiona bit down on her bottom lip. The air stank of cigarette smoke and singed wool-she had dropped hot ash on her coat, somewhere in there-and there was a dank, bitter smell coming off her, spreading on her breath and seeping out of her pores. Interesting fact from the front lines: raw grief smells like ripped leaves and splintered branches, a jagged green shriek.

“It wasn’t anything,” she said, finally. “It was ages ago-months. I’d practically forgotten about it, till…”

I waited.

“It was just… She rang me one evening. She said someone had been in the house.”

I felt Richie snap to attention at my shoulder, like a terrier ready to dash off after his stick. “Did she report this?” I asked.

Fiona rubbed out her cigarette and dropped the butt into the cup. “It wasn’t like that. There was nothing to report. There wasn’t, like, a window broken or the lock smashed or whatever, and there wasn’t anything taken.”

“Then what made her think someone had been in the house?”

The shrug again, even tenser this time. Her head had gone down. “She just thought. I don’t know.”

I said, letting the firm start to edge out the gentle, “This could be important, Ms. Rafferty. What did she say, exactly?”

Fiona took a deep, shuddering breath and pushed hair behind her ear. “OK,” she said. “OK. OK. So Jenny rings me, right, and she’s like, ‘Did you make a copy of our keys?’ I had their keys for about two seconds last winter, Jenny and Pat took the kids to the Canaries for a week and they wanted to know someone could get in if there was a fire or whatever. So I say no, course not-”

“Did you?” Richie asked. “Make a copy?” He pulled it off-he managed to sound just plain interested, not the slightest bit accusing. Which was nice: it meant I wouldn’t have to give him shit, or at least not too big a helping of it, for talking out of turn.

“No! Why would I?”

She had shot upright. Richie shrugged, gave her a deprecating little smile. “Just checking. I’ve got to ask, you know?”

Fiona slumped back. “Yeah. I guess.”

“And no one else could have made copies, that week? You didn’t leave the keys where your flatmates could have taken them, or someone at work-nothing like that? Like I said, we have to ask.”

“I had them on my key ring. They weren’t in a safe or anything-when I’m in work I have my keys in my bag, and when I’m home they’re on a hook in the kitchen. But it’s not like anyone would’ve known what they were, even if they cared. I don’t think I even told anyone that I had them.”

Her flatmates and her workmates were going to be having in-depth chats all the same, not to mention background checks. “Let’s get back to the phone conversation,” I said. “You told Jenny you hadn’t copied her keys…”

“Yeah. Jenny says, ‘Well, someone’s got them, and you’re the only person we gave them to.’ It takes me like half an hour to convince her I don’t have a clue what she’s on about, so she’ll even tell me what’s the story. Finally she says her and the kids were out for the afternoon, at the shops or somewhere, and when she got back someone had been through the house.” Fiona had started picking the tissue to shreds, white wisps floating down on the red of her coat. She had small hands, slim-fingered, with bitten nails. “I ask her how she knows, and at first she won’t say, but finally I get it out of her: the curtains are hooked back all wrong, and she’s missing half a packet of ham and the pen she keeps by the fridge for making shopping lists. I’m like, ‘You have got to be joking,’ and she nearly hangs up on me. So I talk her down, and once she stops giving me hassle, she sounds really freaked out, you know? Really scared. And Jenny isn’t a wimp.”

This was one of the reasons I had come down hard on Richie for trying to postpone this interview. If you get someone talking right after his world ends, there’s a decent chance he won’t be able to stop. Wait till the next day and he’ll already be starting to rebuild his pulverized defenses-people work fast, when the stakes are that high-but catch him straight after the mushroom cloud unfurls and he’ll spill anything from his tastes in porn to his secret nickname for the boss. “Natural enough,” I said. “That’d be pretty unsettling.”

“It was ham slices and a pen! If her jewelry was gone, or half her underwear or something, then yeah, sure, lose the head. But this stuff… I said to her, ‘OK, let’s say somehow someone for some weird reason got in, he wasn’t exactly Hannibal Lecter, was he?’”

I asked, before it could hit her what she had just said, “What did Jenny think of that?”

“She got furious with me again. She said the big deal wasn’t what he’d actually done; it was all the stuff she couldn’t be sure about. Like if he’d been in the kids’ rooms, gone through their stuff-Jenny said if they could afford it she’d throw away everything the kids had, start over, just in case. What he’d touched-she said everything looked like it was out of place all of a sudden, just an inch, or like it was smudged. How he got in. Why he got in-that was really getting to her. She kept saying, ‘Why us? What did he want off us? Do we look like a target? What?’”

Fiona shivered, a sudden jerk that almost doubled her over. I said easily, “It’s a good question. They have an alarm system; do you know if it was set that day?”

She shook her head. “I asked. Jenny said no. She never used to bother, not during the day-I think they’d set it at night, when they went to bed, but that was because the local kids throw parties and stuff in the empty houses, they can get pretty out of control sometimes. Jenny said the estate was basically dead during the day-well, you can see for yourselves-so she hadn’t been bothering. But she said she was going to start. She said, ‘If you’ve got those keys, you’d better not use them. I’m changing the alarm code now and after this it stays on, day and night, end of story.’ Like I said, she sounded really scared.”

But when the uniforms had broken down the door and the four of us had gone tramping all over Jenny’s precious house, the alarm had been off. The obvious explanation was that, if anyone had come in from outside, the Spains had opened the door themselves; that Jenny, scared as she was, hadn’t been scared of this person. “Did she change the locks?”

“I asked that, too-was she going to. She went back and forth, but in the end she said no, probably not, it’d be a couple of hundred quid and the budget couldn’t stretch to that. The alarm would be enough. She said, ‘I don’t even mind that much if he tries to get in again. I’d almost rather he did. At least then we’d know.’ I told you: she’s not a wimp.”

“Where had Pat been that day? Was this before he lost his job?”

“No, after. He’d gone down to Athlone, for a job interview-this was back when him and Jenny still had the two cars.”

“What did he think about the possible break-in?”

“I don’t know. She never said. I thought… to be honest, I thought she hadn’t told him. She was keeping her voice right down, on the phone-that could’ve been just because the kids were asleep, but in a house that size? And she kept saying ‘I’-‘I’m changing the alarm code, I couldn’t fit that in the budget, I’ll sort the guy if I get him.’ Not ‘we.’”

And there it was again: the little thing out of place, the gift I had told Richie to keep his eyes peeled for. “Why wouldn’t she tell Pat? Shouldn’t that be the first thing she did, if she thought they’d had intruders?”

Another shrug. Fiona’s chin was tucked down into her chest. “Because she didn’t want to worry him, I guess. He had enough on his plate. I thought that was probably why she wasn’t planning on changing the locks, too. She couldn’t do it without Pat knowing.”

“You didn’t think that was a little odd-even risky? If someone had broken into his home, didn’t he have the right to know?”

“Maybe, whatever, but I didn’t actually think anyone had been in there. I mean, what’s the simplest explanation? Pat took the pen and ate the bloody ham and one of the kids messed with the curtains, or they had a ghost burglar who could walk through walls and fancied a sandwich?”

Her voice was tightening up, getting defensive. I asked, “Did you say that to Jenny?”

“Yeah, more or less. It just made her worse. She went off on this whole thing about how the pen was from the hotel where they’d stayed on honeymoon and it was special and Pat knew not to move it, and she knew exactly how much ham had been in the packet-”

“Is she the type of person who would know that kind of thing?”

After a moment Fiona said, like it hurt, “Sort of, yeah. I guess. Jenny… she likes doing stuff right. So when she quit work, she got really serious about being a stay-at-home mum, you know? The place was spotless, she fed the kids on organic stuff that she made from scratch, she was doing these exercise DVDs every day so she’d get her figure back… Exactly what she had in her fridge-yeah, she might know.”

Richie asked, “What hotel was the pen from, do you know?”

“Golden Bay Resort, in the Maldives-” Her head came back up and she stared at him. “Do you seriously think…? You think someone actually took it? You think that’s the person who, who, you think they came back and-”

Her voice was starting to spiral dangerously. I asked, before she could lose hold, “When was this incident, Ms. Rafferty?”

She gave me a wild-eyed stare, squeezed hard on the lump of shredded tissue and pulled herself back. “Like three months ago?”

“July.”

“Or it could’ve been earlier, maybe. During the summer, anyway.”

I made a mental note: check Jenny’s phone records for evening calls to Fiona, and check the dates of any prowler reports from Ocean View. “And since then, they’ve had no more problems along those lines?”

Fiona caught a fast breath, and I heard the painful rasp where her throat was closing up. “It could have happened again. I wouldn’t know. Jenny wouldn’t have said anything to me, not after the first time.” Her voice had started to wobble. “I told her to get a grip on herself. Stop talking crap. I thought…”

She made a sound like a kicked puppy, clapped her hands over her mouth and started to cry hard again. It took me a while to figure out what she was saying, through the tissue and the snot. “I thought she was crazy,” she was gasping, over and over. “I thought she was losing it. Oh, God, I thought she was crazy.”