Broken Harbour

4

And that was about as much as we were going to get out of Fiona that day. Calming her down would have taken a lot more time than we had to spare. The extra uniform had arrived; I told him to get names and numbers-family, friends, workplaces, workmates, going right back to when Fiona and Jenny and Pat were in nappies-take Fiona to the hospital, and make sure she knew not to open her mouth around the media. Then we handed her over. She was still crying.

I had my mobile out and was dialing before we even turned away-radio would have been simpler, but too many journos and too many weirdos have scanners these days. I got Richie by the elbow and drew him down the road. The wind was still coming off the sea, wide and fresh, raking Richie’s hair into tufts; I tasted salt on my mouth. Where the footpaths should have been, there were thin dirt tracks in the uncut grass.

Bernadette got me through to the uniform who was at the hospital with Jenny Spain. He was about twelve, he was from some farm somewhere and he was the anal type, which was what I needed. I gave him his orders: once Jennifer Spain got out of surgery, if she made it that far, she needed a private room, and he needed to guard the door like a Rottweiler. No one was getting into that room without showing ID, no one was going in there unaccompanied, and the family wasn’t going in at all. “The victim’s sister is going to be heading down there any minute, and their mother will show up sooner or later. They don’t go into the room.” Richie was hovering and chewing on a thumbnail, head bent over the phone, but that made him glance up at me. “If they want an explanation, and they will, you don’t tell them these are my orders. You apologize, you say this is standard procedure and you’re not authorized to breach it, and you keep saying the same thing over and over till they back off. And get yourself a comfy chair, old son. You could be there for a while.” I hung up.

Richie squinted up at me, against the light. “You think that’s overkill?” I asked.

He shrugged. “If it’s true, what the sister was saying-about the break-in-it’s pretty creepy, all right.”

I said, “You figure that’s why I’m going high security? Because the sister’s story is creepy?”

He stepped back, hands going up, and I realized my voice had risen. “I just meant-”

“As far as I’m concerned, chum, there’s no such thing as creepy. Creepy is for kids on Halloween. I’m making sure all my bases are covered. How stupid do you think we’d look if someone waltzed into that hospital and finished the job? You want to explain that one to the media? Or, come to that, do you want to explain yourself to the Super if tomorrow’s front page is a close-up of Jenny Spain’s injuries?”

“No.”

“No. Neither do I. And if it takes a little overkill to avoid that, then so be it. Now let’s get you inside before the big bad wind freezes your itty-bitty bollix off, shall we?”

Richie kept his mouth shut till we were heading back up the Spains’ drive. Then he said, carefully, “The family.”

“What about them?”

“You don’t want them seeing her?”

“No, I don’t. Did you spot the one big piece of actual info Fiona gave us, in with all your creepy stuff?”

He said, unwillingly, “She had the keys.”

“Yeah,” I said. “She had the keys.”

“She’s in bits. Maybe I’m a sucker, but that looked genuine to me.”

“Maybe it is and maybe it isn’t. All I know is, she had the keys.”

“‘They’re great, they love each other, they love the kids…’ She talked like they were still alive.”

“So? If she can fake the rest, she can fake that. And her relationship with her sister wasn’t as simple as she’s trying to make out. We’ll be spending a lot more time with Fiona Rafferty.”

“Right,” Richie said, but when I pushed the door open he hung back, fidgeting on the doormat and rubbing the back of his head. I asked, making sure the edge was gone out of my voice, “What’s up?”

“The other thing she said.”

“What’s that?”

“Bouncy castles aren’t cheap. My sister wanted to rent one for my niece’s Communion. Couple of hundred squid.”

“Your point?”

“Their financial situation. In February Patrick gets laid off, right? In April, they’re still flush enough that they’re getting Emma a bouncy castle for her birthday party. But by somewhere around July, they’re too skint to change the locks, even though Jenny thinks someone’s been in the gaff.”

“So? Patrick’s redundancy money was running out.”

“Yeah, probably. That’s what I mean. And running out faster than it should’ve done. A good few of my mates are after losing their jobs. All of them who’d been at the same place a few years, they got enough to keep them going for a good while, if they were careful.”

“What are you thinking? Gambling? Drugs? Blackmail?” In this country’s vice league, booze has all of those beat hands down, but booze doesn’t wipe out your bank account in a few months flat.

Richie shrugged. “Maybe, yeah. Or maybe they just kept spending like he was still earning. A couple of my mates did that, too.”

I said, “That’s your generation. Pat and Jenny’s generation. Never been broke, never seen this country broke, so you couldn’t imagine it, even when it started happening in front of your eyes. It’s a good way to be-a lot better than my generation: half of us could be rolling in the stuff and we’d still get paranoid about owning two pairs of shoes, in case we wound up on the side of the road. But it’s got its downside.”

Inside the house the techs were working away: someone called out something that ended in “… Got any extra?” and Larry shouted back cheerfully, “I do of course, check in my…”

Richie nodded. “Pat Spain wasn’t expecting to be broke,” he said, “or he wouldn’t’ve blown the dosh on the bouncy castle. Either he was positive he’d have a new job by the end of summer, or he was positive he’d have some other way of bringing in the cash. If it started hitting him that that wasn’t happening, and the money was running out…” He reached out to touch the broken edge of the door with one finger, drew his hand back in time. “That’s some serious pressure for a man, knowing he can’t look after his family.”

I said, “So your money’s still on Patrick.”

Richie said carefully, “My money’s nowhere till we see what Dr. Cooper thinks. I’m only saying.”

“Good. Patrick’s the favorite, all right, but we’ve got plenty of fences left; plenty of room for an outsider to come up and take it. So the next thing we want to do is see if we can get anyone to narrow the field. I suggest we start with a quick chat to Cooper, before he heads, then go see if the neighbors have anything good for us. By the time we’re done there, Larry and his merry men should be able to give us some kind of update, and they should have the upstairs clear enough that we can go rooting around, try and pick up a few hints about why the money might have been running out. How does that sound to you?”

He nodded. “Nice catch on the bouncy castle,” I said, giving him a pat on the shoulder. “Now let’s go see what Cooper can do to the odds.”

The house was a different place: that miles-deep silence had vanished, blown away like fog, and the air was lit up and buzzing with efficient, confident work. Two of Larry’s lot were working their way methodically through the blood spatter, one of them dropping swabs into test tubes while the other one took Polaroids to pinpoint where each swab had come from. A skinny girl with too much nose was moving around with a video camera. The print guy was peeling tape off a window handle; the mapper was whistling between his teeth while he sketched. Everyone was going at a steady pace that said they were in for a long haul.

Larry was in the kitchen, squatting over a cluster of yellow evidence markers. “What a mess,” he said, with relish, when he saw us. “We’re going to be here forever. Did you come into this kitchen, when you were here before?”

“We stopped at the door,” I said. “The uniforms were in here, though.”

“Of course they were. Don’t let them go off duty without giving us their shoe prints, for elimination.” He straightened up, pressing a hand to the small of his back. “Ow, bollix, I’m getting too old for this job. Cooper’s upstairs with the kids, if you want him.”

“We won’t interrupt him. Any sign of the weapon?”

Larry shook his head. “Nada.”

“How about a note?”

“Does ‘Eggs, tea, shower gel’ count? Because otherwise, no. If you’re thinking this fella here, though”-a nod at Patrick-“you know as well as I do, a lot of men don’t. Strong silent types to the end.”

Someone had turned Patrick onto his back. He was white and slack-jawed, but you get the knack of seeing past that: he had been a good-looking guy, square chin and straight eyebrows, the type girls go for. I said, “We don’t know what we’re thinking. Find anything unlocked? Back door, a window?”

“Not so far. The security wasn’t bad, you know. Strong locks on the windows, double glazing, proper lock on the back door-not the type you can get past with a credit card. I’m not trying to do your job for you, or anything, but I’m just saying: not the easiest house to break into, specially without leaving marks.”

Larry’s money was on Patrick too. “Speaking of keys,” I said, “let me know if you find any. We should have at least three sets of house keys. And keep an eye out for a pen that says Golden Bay Resort. Hang on-”

Cooper was picking his way down the hall like it was dirty, holding his thermometer in one hand and his case in the other. “Detective Kennedy,” he said, resignedly, like he had been hoping against hope that I would somehow vanish off the case. “And Detective Curran.”

“Dr. Cooper,” I said. “I hope we’re not interrupting.”

“I have just completed my preliminary examinations. The bodies may now be removed.”

“Can you provide us with any new information?” One of the things that pisses me off about Cooper is that when he’s around I end up talking like him.

Cooper held up his case and raised his eyebrows at Larry, who said cheerfully, “You can stick that by the kitchen door, nothing interesting going on over there.” He put the case down delicately and bent to put away his thermometer.

“Both children appear to have been smothered,” he said. I felt Richie’s fidgeting go up a gear, at my shoulder. “This is virtually impossible to diagnose definitively, but the absence of any obvious injuries or symptoms of poisoning inclines me towards oxygen deprivation as the cause of death, and they show no evidence of choking, no marks of ligature strangulation and none of the congestion and conjunctival hemorrhaging usually associated with manual strangulation. The Technical Bureau will need to examine the pillows for signs of saliva or mucus indicating that they were pressed over the victims’ faces”-Cooper glanced at Larry, who gave him the thumbs-up-“although, given that the pillows in question were on the victims’ beds, the presence of bodily fluids would hardly constitute a smoking gun, so to speak. On post-mortem examination-which will begin tomorrow morning at precisely six o’clock-I will attempt to further narrow down the possible mechanisms of death.”

I said, “Any sign of sexual assault?” Richie jerked like I was electric. Cooper’s eyes slid over my shoulder to him for a second, amused and disdainful.

“On preliminary examination,” he said, “there are no signs of sexual abuse, either recent or chronic. I will, of course, explore this possibility in more depth at the post-mortem.”

“Of course,” I said. “And this victim here? Can you give us anything?”

Cooper pulled a sheet of paper out of his case and waited, inspecting it, till Richie and I went over to him. The paper was printed with two outlines of a generic male body, front and back. The first one was speckled with a precise, terrible Morse code of red-pen dots and dashes.

Cooper said, “The adult male received four injuries to the chest from what appears to be a single-edged blade. One”-he tapped a horizontal red line halfway up the left side of the outline’s chest-“is a relatively shallow slash wound: the blade struck a rib near the midline and skidded outwards along the bone for approximately five inches, but does not appear to have penetrated farther. While this would have caused considerable bleeding, it would not have been fatal, even without medical treatment.”

His finger moved upwards, to three leaf-shaped red blots that made a rough arc from below the outline’s left collarbone down to the center of its chest. “The other major injuries are puncture wounds, also from a single-edged blade. This one penetrated between the upper left ribs; this one struck the sternum; and this one entered the soft tissue by the edge of the sternum. Until the post-mortem is complete I cannot, of course, state the depths or trajectories of the wounds or describe the damage they caused, but unless the assailant was exceptionally strong, the blow directly to the sternum is unlikely to have done more than possibly flay off a chip of bone. I think we can safely posit that either the first or the third of these injuries is the one that caused death.”

The photographer’s flash went off, leaving a flare of afterimage hovering in front of my eyes: the squiggles of blood on the walls, bright and squirming. For a second I was sure I could smell it. I asked, “Any defense injuries?”

Cooper flicked his finger at the scattering of red on the outline’s arms. “There is a shallow three-inch slash wound to the palm of the right hand, and a deeper one to the muscle of the left forearm-I would venture to guess that this wound is the source of much of the blood at the scene; it would have bled profusely. The victim also shows a number of minor injuries-small nicks, abrasions and contusions to both forearms-that are consistent with a struggle.”

Patrick could have been on either side of that struggle, and the cut palm could go either way: a defense wound, or his hand slipping down the blade as he stabbed. I asked, “Could the knife wounds have been self-inflicted?”

Cooper’s eyebrows lifted, like I was an idiot child who had somehow managed to say something interesting. “You are correct, Detective Kennedy: that is indeed a possibility. It would require considerable willpower, of course, but yes: certainly a possibility. The shallow slash injury could have been a hesitation wound-a tentative preliminary attempt, followed by the deeper successful ones. The pattern is quite common in suicides by cutting the wrists; I see no reason why it should not be found in other methods as well. Assuming the victim was right-handed-which should be ascertained before we venture even to theorize-the positioning of the wounds on the left side of the body would be consistent with self-infliction.”

Little by little, Fiona and Richie’s creepy intruder was falling out of the race, vanishing away over the horizon behind us. He wasn’t gone, not yet, but Patrick Spain was front and center and coming up the straight fast. This was what I’d been expecting all along, but out of nowhere I caught a tiny flash of disappointment. Murder Ds are hunters; you want to bring home a white lion that you tracked down in dark hissing jungle, not a domestic kitty cat gone rabid. And under all that, there was a weak streak in me that had been feeling something like sorry for Pat Spain. Like Richie said, the guy had tried.

I asked, “Can you give us a time of death?”

Cooper shrugged. “As always, this is at best an estimate, and the delay before I was able to examine the bodies does not improve its accuracy. However, the fact that the thermostat is set to maintain a constant temperature is helpful. I feel confident that all three victims died no earlier than three o’clock this morning and no later than five o’clock, with the balance of probability tilting towards the earlier time.”

“Any indication of who died first?”

Cooper said, spacing it out like he was talking to a moron, “They died between three and five A.M. Had the evidence provided further details, I would have said as much.”

On every single case, just for kicks, Cooper finds excuses to diss me in front of people I need to work with. Sooner or later I’m going to work out what kind of complaint to file to make him back off, but so far-and he knows this-I’ve let it slide because, at the moments he picks, I have bigger things on my mind. “I’m sure you would,” I said. “What about the weapon? Can you tell us anything about that?”

“A single-edged blade. As I said.” Cooper was bent over his case again, sliding the sheet of paper away; he didn’t even bother to give me the withering look.

“And this,” Larry said, “is where we come in, if you don’t mind, obviously, Dr. Cooper.” Cooper waved a hand graciously-he and Larry get on, somehow. “Come here, you, Scorcher. Look what my little friend Maureen found, just for you. Or didn’t find, more like.”

The girl with the video camera and the nose moved away from the kitchen drawers and pointed. The drawers all had complicated kiddie-proof gadgets on them, and I could see why: in the top one was a neat molded case, Cuisine Bleu swooping across the inside of the lid in fancy lettering. It was made to hold five knives. Four of them were in place, from a long carving knife to a dinky little thing shorter than my hand: gleaming, honed hair-fine, wicked. The second-biggest knife was missing.

“That drawer was open,” Larry said. “That’s how we spotted them so soon.”

I said, “And no sign of the fifth knife.”

Head-shakes all round.

Cooper was busy delicately detaching his gloves, finger by finger. I asked, “Dr. Cooper, could you take a look and tell us if this knife might be consistent with the victim’s wounds?”

He didn’t turn around. “An informed opinion would necessitate a full examination of the wounds, both at surface level and in cross-section, preferably with the knife in question available for comparison. Do I appear to have performed such an examination?”

When I was a kid I would have lost the rag with Cooper every time, but I know how to manage myself now, and it’ll be a cold day in hell before I give him the satisfaction. I said, “If you can rule this knife out somehow-the size of the blade, maybe, or the shape of the hilt-then we need to know now, before I send a dozen floaters off on a wild-goose chase.”

Cooper sighed and threw the box a half-second glance. “I see no reason to exclude it from consideration.”

“Perfect. Larry, can we take one of the other knives with us, show the search team what we’re looking for?”

“Be my guest. How about this one? Going by the holes in the box, it’s basically the same as the one you’re after, just smaller.” Larry picked out the middle knife, dropped it deftly into a clear plastic evidence bag and handed it over. “Give it back when you’re done.”

“Will do. Dr. Cooper, can you give me any idea of how far the victim could have got after the wounds were inflicted? How long he could have stayed on his feet?”

Cooper gave me the fish-eye again. “Less than a minute,” he said. “Or possibly several hours. Six feet, or conceivably half a mile. Do take your pick, Detective Kennedy, since I am afraid I am unable to provide the kind of answer you want. Far too many variables are involved to permit an intelligent guess, and, regardless of what you might do in my place, I refuse to make an unintelligent one.”

“If you mean could the vic have got rid of the weapon, Scorcher,” Larry said helpfully, “I can tell you he didn’t go out the front, anyway. There’s not a drop of blood in the hall, or on the front door. The bottoms of his shoes are covered, so are his hands, and he’d have had to hold himself up, wouldn’t he, as he got weaker?” Cooper shrugged. “Oh, he would. Besides, look around you: the poor fella was going like a sprinkler. He’d have left us smudges everywhere, not to mention a lovely Hansel-and-Gretel trail. No: once the drama had started, this fella didn’t go into the front of the house, and he didn’t go upstairs.”

“Right,” I said. “If that knife shows up, let me know right away. Until then, we’ll get out of your hair. Thanks, lads.”

The flash went off again. This time it slapped Patrick Spain’s silhouette across my eyes: blazing white, arms flung wide like he was leaping into a tackle, or like he was falling.

“So,” Richie said, on our way down the drive. “Not an inside job, after all.”

“It’s not that simple, old son. Patrick Spain could have gone out into the back garden, maybe even over the wall-or he could have just opened a window and thrown that knife as far as he could. And remember, Patrick’s not the only suspect here. Don’t forget Jenny Spain. Cooper hasn’t checked her out yet: for all we know, she could have been well able to leave the house, stash the knife, come back inside and arrange herself neatly next to her husband. This could be a suicide pact, or she could have been shielding Patrick-she sounds like the type who might well put her last few minutes into protecting the family reputation. Or this could have been her gig, from start to finish.”

The yellow Fiat was gone: Fiona was headed for the hospital to try and see Jenny-hopefully the uniform was driving, so she wouldn’t wrap the car around a tree during a crying jag. Instead, we had a cluster of new cars, up at the end of the road by the morgue van. They could have been journalists, or residents who the uniforms were keeping away from the scene, but I was betting these were my floaters. I headed for them. “And think about this,” I said. “An outsider isn’t going to go in there unarmed and hope he gets a chance to go through the kitchen drawers and find something good. He’s going to bring his own weapon.”

“Maybe he did, and then he spotted those knives and figured he’d be better off with something that doesn’t trace back to him. Or maybe he wasn’t planning on killing anyone. Or maybe that knife isn’t the weapon at all: he nicked it to throw us off.”

“Maybe. That’s one reason why we need to find it fast: to make sure it doesn’t lead us down the wrong track. Want to give me another one?”

Richie said, “Before it’s got rid of.”

“Right. Say this is an outside job: our man-or woman-probably threw the weapon in the water last night, if he has any sense, but if by any chance he’s too thick to have thought of that off his own bat, all this activity’s bound to tip him off that it might be an idea not to have a bloody knife hanging around. If he ditched it somewhere on the estate, we want to pick him up coming back for it; if he took it home with him, we want to catch him dumping it. All this is assuming he’s in the area, obviously.”

Two seagulls exploded up from a heap of rubble, screaming at each other, and Richie’s head whipped around. He said, “He didn’t find the Spains by accident. This isn’t the kind of place where someone could be just passing by, just happen to spot a set of victims that pushed his buttons.”

“No,” I said. “Not that kind of place at all. If he’s not dead or local, then he came in here looking.”

The floaters were seven guys and a girl, all somewhere in their late twenties, hanging around their cars trying to look sharp and businesslike and ready for anything. When they saw us coming their way they straightened up, tugged jackets down, the biggest guy threw his cigarette away. I pointed to the butt and asked, “What’s your plan there?”

He looked blank. I said, “You were going to leave it there, weren’t you? On the ground, for the Bureau to find and file and send away for DNA testing. Which one were you hoping for? That you’d wind up at the top of our suspect list, or at the top of our time-waster list?”

He whipped up the butt and fumbled it back into his packet, and just that fast, all eight of them were on notice: as long as you’re on my investigation, you do not drop the ball. Marlboro Man was scarlet, but someone had to take one for the good of the team.

I said, “Much better. I’m Detective Kennedy, and this is Detective Curran.” I didn’t ask for their names; no time for handshakes and chitchat, and I would only forget anyway. I don’t keep track of my floaters’ favorite sandwiches and their kids’ birthdays, I keep track of what they’re doing and whether they’re doing it well. “You’ll get a full briefing later on, but for now, this is all you need to know: we’re looking for a Cuisine Bleu-brand knife, curved six-inch blade, black plastic handle, part of a matching set, a lot like this but slightly larger.” I held up the plastic evidence bag. “All of you got camera phones? Take a picture, so you’ve got a reminder of exactly what you’re looking for. Delete the photo before you leave the scene tonight. Don’t forget.”

They whipped out phones and passed the evidence bag around, handling it like it was made of soap bubbles. I said, “The knife I’ve described is a good bet for the murder weapon, but we don’t get guarantees in this game, so if you come across another blade hanging around in the undergrowth, for God’s sake don’t skip on your merry way just because it doesn’t fit the description. We’re also keeping an eye out for bloody clothing, footprints, keys and anything else that looks remotely out of place. If you find something that’s got potential, what do you do?”

I nodded at Marlboro Man-if you take someone down a peg, always give him a way to climb back up. He said, “Don’t touch it. Don’t leave it unattended. Call the Bureau lads to photograph it and bag it.”

“Exactly. And call me, too. Anything you find, I want to see. Detective Curran and I will be interviewing the neighbors, so you’ll need our mobile numbers, and vice versa-we’ll be keeping this off the radio for now. The reception out here is shit, so if a call doesn’t get through, text. Don’t leave any voice-mail messages. Everyone got that?” Down the road, our first reporter had set herself up against some picturesque scaffolding and was doing a piece to camera, trying to keep her coattails down against the wind. Within an hour or two there would be a few dozen like her. Plenty of them wouldn’t think twice about hacking into a detective’s voice mail.

We did the number swap all round. “There’ll be more searchers joining us soon,” I said, “and when they take over I’ll have other jobs for you, but we need to get moving now. We’re going to start from the back of the house. Start at the garden wall, work your way outwards, make sure you don’t leave any gaps between your search areas, you know the drill. Go.”

The semi-d that shared a wall with the Spains’ house was empty-permanently empty, nothing in the front room except a screwed-up ball of newspaper and an architectural-level spiderweb-which was a bastard. The nearest signs of human life were two doors down on the other side, in Number 5: the lawn was dead, but there were lace curtains in the windows and a kid’s bike lying on its side in the drive.

Movement behind the lace, as we came up the path. Someone had been watching us.

The woman who answered the door was heavy, with a flat suspicious face and dark hair scraped back in a thin ponytail. She was wearing an oversized pink hoodie, undersized gray leggings that were a bad call, and a lot of fake tan that somehow didn’t stop her looking pasty. “Yeah?”

“Police,” I said, showing her my ID. “Can we come in and have a word?”

She looked at the ID like my photo wasn’t up to her high standards. “I went out earlier, asked those Guards what was going on. They told me to go back inside. I’ve got a right to be on my own road. Yous can’t tell me not to.”

This was going to be a real walk in the park. “I understand,” I said. “If you’d like to leave the premises at any point, they won’t stop you.”

“Better not. And I wasn’t trying to leave the premises, anyway. I only wanted to know what’s after happening.”

“There’s been a crime. We’d like to have a few words with you.”

Her eyes went past me and Richie to the action, and nosiness beat wariness. It usually does. She stood back from the door.

The house had started out exactly like the Spains’, but it hadn’t stayed that way. The hall had been narrowed down by heaps of gear on the floor-Richie caught his ankle on the wheel of a pram, bit back something unprofessional-and the sitting room was overheated and messy, with crowded wallpaper and a thick smell of soup and wet clothes. A chunky kid about ten was hunched on the floor with his mouth open, going at some PlayStation game that was obviously rated 18s. “He’s off sick,” the woman said. She had her arms folded defensively.

“Lucky for us,” I said, nodding to the kid, who ignored us and kept jamming buttons. “He may be able to help us. I’m Detective Kennedy and this is Detective Curran. And you are…?”

“Sinéad Gogan. Mrs. Sinéad Gogan. Jayden, turn that thing off.” Her accent was some semi-rough outskirt of Dublin.

“Mrs. Gogan,” I said, taking a seat on the flowery sofa and finding my notebook, “how well do you know your neighbors?”

She jerked her head towards the Spains’ house. “Them?”

“The Spains, yes.”

Richie had followed me onto the sofa. Sinéad Gogan’s small sharp eyes moved over us, but after a second she shrugged and planted herself in an armchair. “We’d say hiya. We wouldn’t be friendly.”

“You said she’s a snobby cow,” said Jayden, not missing a beat blasting zombies.

His mother shot him a glare that he didn’t see. “You shut up.”

“Or?”

“Or else.”

I said, “Is she a snobby cow?”

“I never said that. I saw an ambulance outside there. What’s happened?”

“There’s been a crime. What can you tell me about the Spains?”

“Did someone get shot?” Jayden wanted to know. The kid could multitask.

“No. What’s snobby about the Spains?”

Sinéad shrugged. “Nothing. They’re grand.”

Richie scratched the side of his nose with his pen. “Seriously?” he asked, a little diffidently. “’Cause-I mean, I haven’t a clue, never met them before, but their gaff looked pretty poncy to me. You can always tell when people’ve got notions of themselves.”

“Should’ve seen it before. The big SUV outside, and him washing it and polishing it every weekend, showing off. That didn’t last, did it?”

Sinéad was still slumped in her armchair, arms folded and thick legs planted apart, but the satisfaction was edging the snottiness out of her voice. Normally I wouldn’t let new lads do the questioning on their first day out, but Richie’s angle was good and his accent was getting us further than mine would. I left him to it.

“Not so much to show off about now,” he agreed.

“Doesn’t stop them. Still think they’re great. Jayden said something to that little young one-”

“Called her a stupid bitch,” Jayden said.

“-and your woman came over here giving it loads, all how the kids weren’t getting on and was there any way to get them to cooperate? Like, so fake, know what I mean? Pretending to be all sweet. I said boys will be boys, deal with it. She wasn’t happy about that; keeps her little princess away from us now. Like we’re not good enough for them. She’s just jealous.”

“Of what?” I asked.

Sinéad gave me a sour stare. “Us. Me.” I couldn’t think of a single reason why Jenny Spain would have been jealous of these people, but apparently that was beside the point. Our Sinéad probably figured she hadn’t been invited to Beyoncé’s hen party because Beyoncé was jealous.

“Right,” I said. “When was this, exactly?”

“Spring. April, maybe. Why? Is she saying Jayden done something on them? Because he never-”

She was half out of her chair, heavy and threatening. “No, no, no,” I said soothingly. “When was the last time you saw the Spains?”

After a moment she decided she believed me and settled back down. “To talk to, that was it. I see them around, but I’ve got nothing to say to them, not after that. Saw her going into the house with the kids yesterday afternoon.”

“At what time?”

“Around quarter to five, maybe. I’d say she was after getting the young one from school and going to the shops-she’d a couple of carrier bags. She looked grand. The little fella was throwing a tantrum ’cause he wanted crisps. Spoilt.”

“Were you and your husband home last night?” I asked.

“Yeah. Where would we go? There’s nowhere. Nearest pub’s in the town, twelve miles away.” Whelan’s and Lynch’s were presumably under concrete and scaffolding now, razed to make way for shiny new versions that hadn’t materialized yet. For a second I smelled Sunday lunch at Whelan’s: chicken nuggets and chips deep-fried from frozen, cigarette smoke, Cidona. “Go all that way and then not be able to drink ’cause you’ve to drive home-there’s no buses that go here. What’s the point?”

“Did you hear anything out of the ordinary?”

Another stare, this one more antagonistic, like I had accused her of something and she was considering glassing me. “What would we have heard?”

Jayden sniggered suddenly. I said, “Did you hear something, Jayden?”

“What, like screams?” Jayden asked. He had even turned around.

“Did you hear screams?”

Pissed-off grimace. “Nah.” Sooner or later some other detective was going to be running into Jayden in a whole different context.

“Then what did you hear? Anything at all could help us.”

Sinéad’s face still had that look, antagonism cut with something like wariness. She said, “We heard nothing. We’d the telly on.”

“Yeah,” Jayden said. “Nothing.” Something on the screen exploded. He said, “Shit,” and dived back into the game.

I asked, “What about your husband, Mrs. Gogan?”

“He didn’t hear nothing either.”

“Could we confirm that with him?”

“He’s gone out.”

“What time will he be back?”

Shrug. “What’s after happening?”

I said, “Can you tell us if you’ve seen anyone entering or leaving the Spains’ house recently?”

Sinéad’s mouth pursed up. “I don’t be spying on my neighbors,” she snapped, which meant she did, as if I had had any doubts.

“I’m sure you don’t,” I said. “But this isn’t about spying. You’re not blind or deaf; you can’t help it if you see people coming and going, or hear their cars. How many houses on this road are occupied?”

“Four. Us, and them, and two down the other end. So?”

“So if you see someone around this end, you can’t help knowing they’re here for the Spains. So have they had any visitors recently?”

She rolled her eyes. “If they have, I didn’t see them. All right?”

“Not as popular as they think,” Richie said, with a little smirk.

Sinéad smirked back. “Exactly.”

He leaned forward. Confidentially: “Does anyone bother coming out to them at all?”

“Not any more, they don’t. When we first moved in, they’d have people over on a Sunday: the same kind as themselves, driving up in the big SUVs and all, swanning around with bottles of wine-a few cans weren’t good enough for them. They used to have barbecues. Showing off again.”

“Not these days?”

The smirk got bigger. “Not since he lost his job. They’d a birthday party for one of the kids, back in spring, but that’s the last time I saw anyone go in there. Like I said, though, I don’t be watching. But it just goes to show you, doesn’t it?”

“It does, yeah. Tell us something: have you had any hassle with mice, rats, anything like that?”

That got Jayden’s attention. He even hit Pause. “Jesus! Did rats eat them?”

“No,” I said.

“Ahhh,” he said, disappointed, but he kept watching us. The kid was unnerving. He had flat, colorless eyes, like a squid.

His mother said, “Never had rats. I wouldn’t be surprised, the way the drains are in this place, but no. Not yet, anyway.”

Richie said, “It isn’t great out here, no?”

“It’s a dump,” Jayden said.

“Yeah? Why?”

He shrugged. Sinéad said, “Have you looked at the place?”

“Looks all right to me,” Richie said, surprised. “Nice houses, loads of space, you’ve done the place up lovely…”

“Yeah, that’s what we thought. Looked great on the plans. Hang on-”

She heaved herself out of the chair with a grunt and bent over-I could have lived without that view-to paw through the mess on a side table: celebrity magazines, spilled sugar, a baby monitor, half a sausage roll on a greasy plate. “Here,” she said, shoving a brochure at Richie. “That’s what we thought we were buying.”

The front of the brochure said OCEAN VIEW, in the same curly writing as the signboard outside the estate, over a photo of a laughing couple hugging two catalog kids in front of a snow-white house and Mediterranean-blue waves. Inside was the menu: four-bed, five-bed, detached, duplex, whatever your heart desired, all of them so pristine they almost glowed and so well Photoshopped you could barely tell they were scale models. The houses had names: the Diamond was a five-bed detached with garage, the Topaz was a two-bed duplex, the Emerald and the Pearl and the rest were somewhere in between-it looked like we were in the Sapphire. More curly lettering cooed breathlessly about the beach, the childcare facility, the leisure center, a corner shop, a playground, “a self-contained haven with all the premier facilities of cutting-edge luxe living on your doorstep.”

It should have looked pretty damn sexy-like I said before, other people can get their kicks being snobby about new developments if they want, but I love them; they feel positive, like big bets placed on the future. For some reason, though-maybe because I’d seen what was outside-this brochure struck me as what Richie would have called creepy.

Sinéad jabbed a stubby finger at the brochure. “That’s what we were promised. All that. Says it in the contract and everything.”

“And that’s not what you got?” Richie asked.

She snorted. “Does it look like it?”

He shrugged. “It’s not finished yet. Could be great when it is.”

“It’s not going to be bleeding finished. People stopped buying, with the recession, so the builders stopped building. We went out one morning a few months back and they were gone. Everything, diggers and all. Never came back.”

“Jaysus,” Richie said, shaking his head.

“Yeah, Jaysus. Our downstairs toilet’s banjaxed, but the plumber who put it in won’t come and fix it ’cause he was never paid. Everyone does be saying we should go to court and get compensation, but who’d we bring?”

“The builders?” I suggested.

She gave me that flat stare again, like she was considering punching me for being such a thick. “Um, yeah, we did actually think of that. Can’t find them. They started hanging up on us; now they’ve changed their number. We went to yous lot, even. Yous said our toilet wasn’t a police matter.”

Richie lifted the brochure to get her attention back. “What about all this stuff, the childcare and that?”

“That,” Sinéad said. Her mouth squashed up in disgust. It made her even uglier. “In there’s the only place you’ll ever see that. We complained about the childcare place a load of times-that was one of the reasons we bought here, and then hello, nothing? It opened, in the end. Closed after a month ’cause there was only five kids going. Where the playground was supposed to be, that’s like something out of Baghdad; kids’d take their life in their hands playing there. The leisure center never even got built. We complained about that too, they put an exercise bike in an empty house and said there you go. Bike got robbed.”

“How about the shop?”

A humorless sniff of laughter. “Yeah, right. I’ve to go five miles to buy milk, to the petrol station on the motorway. We haven’t got streetlights. I’m afraid for my life to go out on me own after dark, there could be rapists or anything-there’s a load of non-nationals renting a house over in Ocean View Close. And if something happened to me, would yous lot come out and do anything about it? My husband rang yous a few months back, when there was a bunch of knackers having a party in one of them houses across the road. Yous didn’t show up till the morning. We could’ve been burnt out of it for all you’d care.”

In other words, getting anything out of Sinéad was always going to be this much fun. I said, “Do you know if the Spains had been having any similar problems-with the development company, with the partiers across the road, with anyone?”

Shrug. “Wouldn’t know. Like I said, we weren’t friendly, know what I mean? What happened to them, anyway? Are they dead, or what?”

Before long, the morgue boys were going to be bringing out the bodies. I said, “Maybe Jayden should wait in another room.”

Sinéad eyed him. “No point. He’ll only listen at the door.” Jayden nodded.

I said, “There’s been a violent attack. I’m not in a position to give you details, but the crime in question is murder.”

“Jaysus,” Sinéad breathed, swaying forward. Her mouth stayed open, wet and avid. “Who’s been kilt?”

“We can’t give you that information.”

“Did he go for her, did he?”

Jayden had forgotten about his game. On the screen a zombie was frozen splayed in mid-fall, with scraps of its head mushrooming everywhere. I asked, “Do you have any reason to think he might go for her?”

That wary flick of her eyelids. She slumped back in the chair and folded her arms again. “I was only asking.”

“If you do, Mrs. Gogan, you need to tell us.”

“I don’t know and I don’t care.”

Bullshit, but I know that thick, lumpy stubborn: the harder I pushed, the more solid it would get. “Right,” I said. “In the last few months, have you seen anyone around the estate who you didn’t recognize?”

Jayden let out a high, sharp snicker. Sinéad said, “Never see anyone, hardly. And I wouldn’t recognize most of them anyway. We’re not, like, all buddy-buddy out here. I’ve friends of my own; I don’t need to be hanging off the neighbors.”

Translated, you couldn’t have paid the neighbors enough to hang out with the Gogans. They were probably all just jealous. “Then have you seen anyone who looked out of place? Anyone who worried you for any reason?”

“Only the non-nationals in the Close. There’s dozens of them in that house. I’d say the lot of them are illegal. You’re not going to check that out either, though, are you?”

“We’ll pass it on to the appropriate department. Has anyone called to the door? Selling something, maybe? Asking to check the pipes or the wiring?”

“Yeah, right. Like anyone cares about our wiring-Jaysus!” Sinéad shot upright. “Was it, like, some psycho that broke in? Like on that show on the telly, like a serial killer?”

All of a sudden she looked alive. Fear had knocked the blankness off her face. I said, “We can’t give details of-”

“’Cause if it’s that, you better tell me now, right? I’m not staying here waiting for some sick bastard to come in and torture us, yous lot would stand there and watch him go at it before you’d do a bleeding thing-”

It was the first actual emotion we’d seen out of her. The ghost-blue children next door: nothing but gossip fodder, no more real than some TV show, right up until the danger might be personal. I said, “I can promise you we won’t stand there and watch.”

“Don’t you disrespect me! I’ll get onto the radio, I will, I’ll ring the Joe Duffy Show-”

And we would spend the rest of this investigation battling our way through a media cyclone of cops-don’t-care-about-the-little-guy hysteria. I’ve been there. It feels like someone’s using a tennis ball machine to fire starving pug dogs at you. Before I could come up with something soothing, Richie leaned forward and said earnestly, “Mrs. Gogan, you’ve got every right to be worrying. Sure, you’re a mammy.”

“Exactly. I’ve got my kids to think about. I’m not gonna-”

“Was it a pedophile?” Jayden wanted to know. “What’d he do to them?”

I was starting to see why Sinéad ignored him. “Now, you know there’s a load we can’t be telling you,” Richie said, “but I can’t leave a mammy to worry, so I’m trusting you not to pass this on. Can I do that, yeah?”

I almost cut him off right there, but he had been working this interview well, so far. And Sinéad was calming down, that avid look creeping back up under the fear. “Yeah. All right.”

“I’m gonna put it like this,” Richie said. He leaned closer. “You’ve got nothing to be afraid of. If anyone dangerous is out there, and I’m only saying if, we’re doing everything that needs doing about it.” He left an impressive pause and did something meaningful with his eyebrows. “Do you get me, yeah?”

Confused silence. “Yeah,” Sinéad said, in the end. “Course.”

“You do, of course. Now remember: not a word.”

She said primly, “I wouldn’t.” She would tell everyone she knew, obviously, but she had shag-all to tell them: she would have to stick to a smug look and vague hints about secret info she couldn’t share. It was a cute little trick. Richie went up a rung on my ladder.

“And you’re not worried any more, sure you’re not? Now that you know.”

“Ah, no. I’m grand.”

The baby monitor let out a furious shriek. “For fuck’s sake,” said Jayden, hitting Play and turning up the zombie volume.

“Baby’s awake,” Sinéad said, without moving. “I’ve to go.”

I said, “Is there anything else you can tell us about the Spains? Anything at all?”

Another shrug. That flat face didn’t change, but something flickered in her eyes. We would be coming back to the Gogans.

On our way down the drive I said to Richie, “You want to talk about creepy? Take a look at that kid.”

“Yeah,” Richie said. He fingered his ear and glanced over his shoulder at the Gogans’. “Something he’s not telling us.”

“Him? The mother, sure. But the kid?”

“Definitely.”

“Right. When we come back to them, you can take a crack at him.”

“Yeah? Me?”

“You did a good job in there. Have a think about how you’re going to go about it.” I tucked my notebook into my pocket. “Meanwhile, who else do you want to ask about the Spains?”

Richie turned back to face me. “D’you know something?” he said. “I haven’t got a clue. Normally I’d say let’s talk to the families, the neighbors, the victims’ friends, the people they work with, the lads down the pub where he drinks, the people who saw them last. But they were both out of work. There’s no pub for him to go to. Nobody calls round, not even their families, not when it means coming all this way. It could’ve been weeks since anyone even saw them, except maybe at the school gates. And that’s the neighbors.”

He jerked his head backwards. Jayden was pressed up against the sitting-room window, controller in one hand, mouth still hanging open. He saw me catch him looking, but he didn’t even blink.

“The poor bastards,” Richie said softly. “They’d no one.”