Broken Harbour

6

In every way there is, murder is chaos. Our job is simple, when you get down to it: we stand against that, for order.

I remember this country back when I was growing up. We went to church, we ate family suppers around the table, and it would never even have crossed a kid’s mind to tell an adult to fuck off. There was plenty of bad there, I don’t forget that, but we all knew exactly where we stood and we didn’t break the rules lightly. If that sounds like small stuff to you, if it sounds boring or old-fashioned or uncool, think about this: people smiled at strangers, people said hello to neighbors, people left their doors unlocked and helped old women with their shopping bags, and the murder rate was scraping zero.

Sometime since then, we started turning feral. Wild got into the air like a virus, and it’s spreading. Watch the packs of kids roaming inner-city estates, mindless and brakeless as baboons, looking for something or someone to wreck. Watch the businessmen shoving past pregnant women for a seat on the train, using their 4x4s to force smaller cars out of their way, purple-faced and outraged when the world dares to contradict them. Watch the teenagers throw screaming stamping tantrums when, for once, they can’t have it the second they want it. Everything that stops us being animals is eroding, washing away like sand, going and gone.

The final step into feral is murder. We stand between that and you. We say, when no one else will, There are rules here. There are limits. There are boundaries that don’t move.

I’m the least fanciful guy around, but on nights when I wonder whether there was any point to my day, I think about this: the first thing we ever did, when we started turning into humans, was draw a line across the cave door and say: Wild stays out. What I do is what the first men did. They built walls to keep back the sea. They fought the wolves for the hearth fire.

I got everyone together in the Spains’ sitting room-it was much too small, but there was no way we were having this chat in the fishbowl kitchen. The floaters clustered up shoulder to shoulder, trying not to stand on the rug or brush against the telly, like the Spains still needed their guests to have good manners. I told them what was behind the garden wall. One of the techs whistled, a long soft sound.

“Here, Scorcher,” Larry said. He had settled himself comfortably on the sofa. “Now I’m not doubting you, we both know better than that, but is there no chance this is just some homeless guy who found himself a nice cozy place to doss down for a while?”

“With binoculars and an expensive sleeping bag, and bugger-all else? Not a chance, Lar. That nest was set up for one reason: so someone could spy on the Spains.”

“And he’s not homeless,” Richie said. “Or if he is, he’s got somewhere he can have a wash, himself and the sleeping bag. No smell.”

I said to the nearest floater, “Get onto the Dog Unit and have them send a general purpose dog out here ASAP. Tell them we’re after a murder suspect and we need the best trailing dog they’ve got.” He nodded and backed into the hall, already pulling out his phone. “Until that dog gets a chance at the scent, no one else goes into that house. All of you”-I nodded to the floaters-“can pick up the search for the weapon, but this time keep well away from that hide-head out the front, around to both sides, and cut down to the beach. When the dog handler arrives, I’ll text you all, and you’ll come back here at a run. I’m going to need chaos outside the front of this place: people running, shouting, driving up on full lights and sirens, crowding around to look at something-give it as much drama as you can. Then pick a saint, or whatever you’re into, and say a prayer that if our man’s watching, the chaos lures him round to the front to see what’s going on.”

Richie was leaning against a wall with his hands in his pockets. He said, “At least he’s after leaving his binoculars behind. If he wants to see what’s up, he can’t just stay somewhere out the back and check it out long-distance; he’ll have to come around the front, get in close.”

“There’s no guarantee he hasn’t got a second pair, but we’ll hope. If he comes close enough, we might even get our hands on him, although that’s probably too much to ask; this whole estate is a warren, he’s got enough hiding places to keep him going for months. Meanwhile, the dog goes around to that nest, scents off the sleeping bag-the handler can bring the bag down to the ground, if he can’t get the dog up there-and gets to work. One tech heads up there with them, inconspicuously, takes video and fingerprints, and leaves. Everything else can wait.”

“Gerry,” Larry said, pointing at a gangly young guy, who nodded. “Fastest print tape in the West.”

“Good man, Gerry. If you get prints, you head straight back to the lab and do what you do. The rest of us will keep up the action out front for as long as you need it, and then we’ll go back to what we were doing. We’ve got until six o’clock sharp. Then we clear the area. Anyone who’s still working inside the house can keep going, but the outside needs to look like we’ve packed up and gone home for the night. I want the coast clear-literally-for our man.”

Larry’s eyebrows were practically in his bald patch. It was a gamble, staking the whole evening’s work on this one chance-witnesses’ memories can change even overnight, rain showers can wash away blood and scent, tides can pull dumped weapons or bloody clothes out to sea forever-and gambling isn’t like me, but this case wasn’t like most cases. “Once it gets dark,” I said, “we re-deploy.”

“You’re assuming the dog won’t get him,” Larry pointed out. “You think this fella knows what he’s at?”

I saw the floaters shift as the thought sent a ripple of alertness through them. “That’s what we’re aiming to find out,” I said. “Probably not, or he’d have cleaned up after himself, but I’m not taking any chances. Sunset’s around half past seven, maybe a little later. About eight or half past, as soon as we can’t be seen, Detective Curran and I will head up to that nest, where we’ll spend the night.” I caught Richie’s eye; he nodded. “Meanwhile, two detectives will be patrolling the estate-again, inconspicuously-keeping an eye out for any action, in particular any action heading this way. Any takers?”

All of the floaters’ hands shot up. I picked Marlboro Man-he had earned it-and a kid who looked young enough that one night with no sleep wouldn’t wipe him out for the rest of the week. “Keep in mind that he could come from outside the estate or from inside-he could be hiding out in a derelict house, or he could live here and that’s how he targeted the Spains. If you spot anything interesting, ring me straightaway. Still no radios: we have to assume that this guy is into his surveillance gear, deep enough that he owns a scanner. If someone looks promising, tail him if you can, but your top priority is making sure he doesn’t spot you. If you get even the faintest sense that he’s onto you, back right off and report to me. Got it?”

They nodded. I said, “I’ll also need a pair of techs to spend the night in here.”

“Not me,” Larry said. “You know I love you, Scorcher, but I’ve got a previous engagement and I’m too old for the all-night carry-on, no double entendre intended.”

“No problem. I’m sure someone could do with the overtime, am I right?” Larry mimed his jaw hitting his chest-I have a rep for not authorizing overtime. A few of the techs nodded. “You can bring sleeping bags and take turns getting some kip in the sitting room, if you want to; I just need some kind of ongoing visible activity. Bring things back and forth from your car, swab things in the kitchen, take a laptop out there and pull up a graph that looks professional… Your job is to get our man interested enough that he can’t resist the temptation to go up to his nest, get his binoculars and check out what you’re doing.”

“Bait,” said Gerry the print tech.

“Exactly. We’ve got bait, trackers, hunters, and we’ll just have to hope our man walks into the trap. We’ll have a couple of hours off between six o’clock and nightfall; get something to eat, head back to the office if you need to check in, pick up anything you’ll want for the stakeout. For now, I’ll let you get back to what you’re doing. Thanks, lads and ladies.”

They moved off-two of the techs were flipping a coin for the overtime, a couple of floaters were trying to impress me or each other by taking notes. The scaffolding had stamped smears of rust onto the sleeve of my overcoat. I found a tissue in my pocket and headed out to the kitchen to dampen it.

Richie followed me. I said, “If you need something to eat, you can take the car and find that petrol station the Gogan woman talked about.”

He shook his head. “I’m grand.”

“Good. And you’re OK for tonight?”

“Yeah. No probs.”

“At six we’ll head back to HQ, brief the Super, pick up anything we need, then meet up again and come back here.” If Richie and I could make it into town fast enough, and if the briefing didn’t take too long, there was just a chance I would have time to get hold of Dina and put her in a taxi to Geri’s. “You’re welcome to put in for overtime if you want. I’m not planning to.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t believe in overtime.” Larry’s boys had cut the water and taken out the sink trap, in case our boy had washed up, but a leftover trickle came out of the tap. I caught it on the tissue and scrubbed at my sleeve.

“I heard that, all right. How come?”

“I’m not a babysitter, or a waiter. I don’t charge by the hour. And I’m not some politician looking for ways to get paid three times over for every tap of work I do. I get paid my salary to do my job, whatever that happens to mean.”

Richie didn’t comment. He said, “You’re pretty definite that this guy’s watching us, aren’t you?”

“On the contrary: he’s probably miles away, at work, if he’s got a job to go to and if he had the cool to go in today. But, like I said to Larry, I’m not taking any chances.”

In the corner of my eye something white flicked. I was facing the windows, braced ready to lunge at the back door, before I knew I had moved. One of the techs was out in the garden, squatting on a paving stone, swabbing.

Richie let that speak for itself while I straightened up and stashed the tissue in my briefcase. Then he said, “So maybe ‘definite’ isn’t the right word. But you think he is.”

The great Rorschach blot on the floor where the Spains had lain was darkening, crusting at the edges. Above it, the windows ricocheted gray afternoon light back and forth, throwing off dislocated, off-kilter reflections: swirling leaves, a slice of wall, the heart-stopping nosedive of a bird against cloud. “Yeah,” I said. “I do. I think he’s watching.”

And that left us with the rest of the afternoon to get through, on our way to that night. The media had started swarming up-later than I’d expected; clearly their satnavs didn’t like the place any better than mine had-and were doing their thing, hanging over the crime-scene tape to get shots of the techs going in and out, doing pieces to camera in their best solemn voices. In my book, the media are a necessary evil: they live off the animal inside us, they bait their front pages with secondhand blood for the hyenas to snuffle up, but they come in useful often enough that you want to stay on their good side. I checked my hair in the Spains’ bathroom mirror and went out to give them a statement. For a second I actually considered sending Richie. The thought of Dina hearing my voice talking about Broken Harbor sent heartburn flaring across my chest.

There were a couple of dozen of them out there, everything from broadsheets to tabloids and from national TV to local radio. I kept it as brief and as monotone as possible, on the off chance that they might quote me instead of using the actual footage, and I made sure they got the impression that all four of the Spains were dead as dodoes. My man would be watching the news, and I wanted him smug and secure: no living witnesses, the perfect crime, give yourself a pat on the back for being such a winner and then come on down to take another look at your prize work.

The search team and the dog handler arrived not long afterwards, which meant we had plenty of cast members for the drama in the front garden-the Gogan woman and her kid stopped pretending they weren’t watching and stuck their heads out of the door, and the reporters practically burst the crime-scene tape trying to see what was going on, which I took as a good sign. I bent over something imaginary in the hall with the rest of the gang, shouted meaningless jargon out the door, jogged up and down the drive to get things from the car. It took all the willpower I had not to scan the tangle of houses for a blink of movement, a flash of light off lenses, but I never once looked up.

The dog was a shining, muscled Alsatian that picked up a scent off the sleeping bag in a split second, trailed it to the end of the road and lost it. I had the handler walk the dog through the house-if our man was watching, I needed him to think that was why we had called them in. Then I had the search team take over the weapon hunt, and sent the floaters out on new assignments. Go down to Emma’s school-fast, before it lets out for the day-talk to her teacher, talk to her friends and their parents. Go down to Jack’s preschool, ditto. Go around every shop near the schools, find out where Jenny got those carrier bags that Sinéad Gogan saw, find out if anyone saw someone following her, if anyone has CCTV footage. Go to the hospital where Jenny’s being treated, talk to whichever relatives have shown, track down whichever ones haven’t, make sure all of them know to keep their mouths shut and stay far from the media; go to every hospital within a sixty-mile radius, ask them about last night’s crop of knife wounds, and hope our boy got cut in the struggle. Go ring HQ and find out if the Spains made any calls to the police in the last six months; go ring the Chicago PD and have them send someone to break the news to Pat’s brother, Ian. Go find anyone who lives in this godforsaken place, threaten them with everything up to and including jail time if they tell the media anything they don’t tell us first; find out if they saw the Spains, if they saw anything strange, if they saw anything at all.

Richie and I went back to the house search. It was a different thing, now that the Spains had turned into that half myth, rare as a sweet-voiced hidden bird that no one ever sees alive: genuine victims, innocent to the bone. We had been looking for the thing they had done wrong. Now we were looking for the thing that they could never have guessed they were doing wrong. The receipts that would show who had sold them food, petrol, children’s clothes; the birthday cards that would tell us who had come to Emma’s party, the leaflet that would list the people who had attended some residents’ meeting. We were looking for the bright lure that had hooked something clawed and simian, brought it following them home.

The first floater to check in was the one I had sent to Jack’s preschool. “Sir,” he said. “Jack Spain didn’t go here.”

We had pulled the number from a list, in bubbly girly handwriting, pinned above the phone table: doctor, Garda station, work-crossed out-E school, J preschool. “Ever?”

“No, he did up until June. When they finished up for the summer. He was down on the list to come back this year, but in August Jennifer Spain rang up and canceled his place. She said they were going to keep him at home instead. The lady who runs the place, she thinks the problem was money.”

Richie leaned closer to the phone-we were still sitting on the Spains’ bed, getting deeper into paper. “James, howya, it’s Richie Curran. Did you get the names of any kids Jack was friendly with?”

“Yeah. Three young lads in particular.”

“Good,” I said. “Go talk to them and their parents. Then get back to us.”

Richie said, “Can you ask the parents when they last saw Jack? And when they last brought their young fellas over to the Spains’ to play?”

“Will do. I’ll be back in touch ASAP.”

“Do that.” I hung up. “What’s the story there?”

“Fiona said, when she was talking to Jenny yesterday morning, Jenny told her about Jack bringing over a mate from preschool. But if Jack wasn’t in preschool…”

“She could have meant a friend he made last year.”

“Didn’t sound like that, though, did it? It could’ve been a misunderstanding, but like you said: anything that doesn’t fit. Can’t see why Fiona would’ve lied to us about that, or why Jenny would’ve lied to Fiona, but…”

But if either of them had, it would be nice to know about it. I said, “Fiona could have made it up because she and Jenny had a blazing row yesterday morning and she feels guilty about it. Jenny could have made it up because she didn’t want Fiona to know how broke they were. Rule Number Seven, I think we’re on: everyone lies, Richie. Killers, witnesses, bystanders, victims. Everyone.”

The other floaters called in, one by one. According to the Chicago boys, Ian Spain’s reaction had been “all good”-your standard mix of shock and grief, nothing to raise red flags; he said he and Pat hadn’t been e-mailing much, but Pat hadn’t mentioned any stalkers, any confrontations, anyone who was worrying him. Jenny had barely more family than he did-her mother had shown up at the hospital and there were some cousins in Liverpool, but that was it. The mother’s reaction had been all good too, complete with a side order of near-hysteria about being kept away from Jenny. In the end the floater had managed to get a basic statement, for what it was worth; Jenny and her mother weren’t close, and Mrs. Rafferty knew less about the Spains’ lives than Fiona did. The floater had tried to nudge her into going home, but she and Fiona had set up camp at the hospital, which at least meant we knew where to find them.

Emma had actually been going to primary school, where the teachers said she had been a nice kid from a nice family: popular, well behaved, a people pleaser, no genius but well able to keep up. The floater had a list of teachers and friends. No suspicious knife wounds at the nearby A &E departments, no phone calls to us from the Spains. The door-to-door had turned up nothing: out of maybe two hundred fifty houses, fifty or sixty showed any signs of official occupation, about half of those had someone home, and no one in those couple of dozen knew much about the Spains. None of them thought they had seen or heard anything unusual, but they couldn’t be sure: there were always joyriders, always half-wild teenagers prowling around the empty streets, setting bonfires and finding things to smash.

Jenny’s shopping traced back to the supermarket in the nearest decent-sized town, where at about four o’clock the previous afternoon she had bought milk, mince, crisps and a few other things that the checkout girl didn’t remember-the shop was working on pulling the receipt, and the CCTV footage. Jenny had seemed fine, the girl said, hurried and a bit stressed, but polite; no one had been talking to the family, no one had followed them out, at least not that the girl had seen. She only remembered them because Jack had been bouncing up and down in the trolley, singing, and while she swiped their shopping he had told her he was going to be a big scary animal for Halloween.

The search tossed up small things, low-tide flotsam and jetsam. Photo albums, address books, cards congratulating the Spains on their engagement, their wedding, their babies; receipts from a dentist, a doctor, a pharmacist. Every name and every number went into my notebook. Slowly, the list of question marks was getting shorter and the list of possible contact points was getting longer.

Computer Crime rang me late in the afternoon, to say they had taken a preliminary look at what we had sent them. We were in Emma’s room: I had been going through her schoolbag (lots of pink-based crayon drawings, TODAY I AM A PRINCESS in careful, wobbly capitals), Richie had been down on his hunkers on the floor, flipping through the fairy tales on her bookshelf. With her gone and the bed stripped-the morgue boys had wrapped her sheets around her and taken the lot, in case our man had shed hairs or fibers while he did what he did-the room was so empty it sucked the breath out of you, as if she had been taken away a thousand years ago and no one had stepped in here since.

The techie was called Kieran or Cian or something. He was young and fast-talking, and he was enjoying himself: this was clearly a lot nearer to what he had signed on for than trawling hard drives for kiddie porn, or whatever he usually did with his day. Nothing that stood out on the phones and nothing interesting about the baby monitors, but the computer was a different story. Someone had wiped it.

“So I’m not going to turn the machine on and wreck all the access times on the files, right? Plus, for all I know, someone’s set a dead man’s switch to wipe the whole thing when it gets powered up. So first thing I do, I take a copy of the hard drive.”

I put him on speakerphone. Above us, the insistent, nasty drone of a helicopter was circling, too low-media; one of the floaters would have to find out who, and warn them off showing footage of the hide.

“I plug the copy into my own machine and go for the browser history-if there’s anything good in there, that’s where you’re going to find it. Except this computer doesn’t have a browser history. Like, nothing. Not one page.”

“So they only used the internet for e-mail.” I already knew I was wrong: Jenny’s online shopping.

“Bzzt, thanks for playing. Nobody uses the internet just for e-mail. Even my granny managed to find herself a Val Doonican fan site, and she only has a computer because I got it to stop her getting depressed after my granddad died. You can set your browser to delete your history every time you quit, but most people don’t: you see that setting on public computers, internet cafés or whatever, not home machines. I checked anyway, and nope, the browser’s not set to clear history. So I check for any deletions in the browser history and the temporary files, and voilà: four oh eight this morning, someone manually deleted the lot.”

Richie, still kneeling on the floor, caught my eye. We had been so focused on the lookout post and the break-in; it had never occurred to us that our man might have subtler ways of coming and going, less visible catflaps to let him wander through the Spains’ lives. I had to stop myself glancing over my shoulder, to make sure nothing was watching me from Emma’s wardrobe. “Good catch,” I said.

The techie was still going. “Now I want to know what else the dude did while he was messing around in there, right? So I do a scan for any other stuff that was deleted around the same time. And guess what pops up? The entire Outlook PST file. Nuked. At four eleven in the A.M.”

Richie had his notebook propped on the bed and was taking notes. I said, “That’s their e-mail?”

“Oh yeah. All their e-mail, like everything they’ve ever sent and received. E-mail addresses, too.”

“Anything else get deleted?”

“No, that’s it. There’s a bunch of other stuff on the machine-all your basics, like photos and documents and music-but none of it’s been accessed or modified in the last twenty-four hours. Your dude went in there, went straight for the online stuff, and got out.”

“‘Our dude,’” I said. “You’re sure the owners didn’t do it themselves?”

Kieran or Cian snorted. “No chance.”

“Why not?”

“Because they aren’t exactly computer geniuses. Do you know what’s on that machine, like right on the desktop? A file named, I couldn’t make this up, Passwords. In which are, you’ll never guess, all of these people’s passwords. E-mail, online banking, everything. But that’s not even the good part. They used the same password for a load of stuff, like a bunch of forums, eBay, the actual computer: EmmaJack. I get a bad feeling about this straightaway, but I’m all about giving people the benefit of the doubt, so before I actually start banging my head off my keyboard, I phone Larry and ask him if the owners have rug rats and what they’re called. He says-brace yourself-Emma and Jack.”

I said, “They probably assumed if the computer got nicked, it would be by someone who didn’t know the children’s names, so he wouldn’t be able to switch it on and read the file to begin with.”

The techie did a gusty sigh that said he had just dumped me in the same category as the Spains. “Um, not the point. My girlfriend’s called Adrienne, and I’d spork my own eyes out before I’d use that for a password to anything, because I have standards. Take it from me, right: anyone clueless enough to use his kids’ freaking names as a password can barely wipe his own arse, never mind his hard drive. Someone else did this.”

“Someone with computer knowledge.”

“Well, some, yeah. More than the owners, anyway. We don’t have to be talking about a professional, but he knew his way around a machine.”

“How long would it have taken?”

“The whole deal? Not long. He shut the machine down at four seventeen. In and out in less than ten minutes.”

Richie asked, “Would this fella have known you would work out what he’d done? Or would he figure he was after covering his tracks?”

The techie made a noncommittal noise. “Depends. Plenty of guys out there think we’re a bunch of muck savages with barely enough brains to find the on button. And plenty of guys are just about computer savvy enough to land themselves in the shit, specially if they’re in a hurry, which your dude could have been, right? If he was really serious about zapping the crap out of those files, or about covering his tracks so I’d never know anyone had touched the machine, there are ways-deletion software-but that takes more time and more smarts. Your dude was short on one or the other, or both. Overall, I’d bet he knew we’d be able to see the deletions.”

But he had made them anyway. There had been something crucial in there. I said, “Tell me you can get this stuff back.”

“Some of it, sure, probably. The question is how much. We’ve got recovery software that I’m gonna try, but if this dude overwrote the deleted files a few times-and I would’ve, if I was him-then they’re gonna be kind of munged. The damn things get corrupted enough anyway, just through normal use; throw in a little malicious deletion, and we could end up with soup. Leave it with me, though.”

He sounded like he was itching to get stuck in. “Give it everything you’ve got,” I said. “We’ll keep our fingers crossed.”

“Don’t bother. If I can’t beat some half-arsed amateur and his delete button, I might as well hang up the big-boy jockstrap and find myself a job in tech-support hell. I’ll get you something. Trust me.”

“‘Half-arsed amateur,’” Richie said, as I put my phone away. He was still kneeling on the floor, absently fingering a framed photo on the bookshelf: Fiona and a guy with floppy brown hair, holding up a tiny Emma swamped by her lace christening dress, all three of them smiling. “But he managed to get past the login password.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Either the computer was already on when he got here, in the middle of the night, or he knew the children’s names.”

“Scorcher,” Larry said happily, bouncing over from the kitchen windows, when he saw us in the doorway. “The very man I was thinking of. Come here, you, and bring that young fella with you. You’re going to be very, very happy with me.”

“I could do with being very happy with something right now. What’ve you got?”

“What would make your day?”

“Don’t be a tease, Lar. I don’t have the energy. What have you magicked up?”

“No magic about it. This was good old-fashioned luck. You know how your uniforms went charging through here like a herd of buffalo in mating season?”

I wagged a finger at him. “They’re not my uniforms, my friend. If I had uniforms, they’d sneak through scenes on their tippy toes. You’d never even know they’d been there.”

“Well, I knew this lot had been here, all right. Obviously they had to save the living victim, but honest to God, I think they lay down on the floor and wallowed, or something. Anyway. I thought we’d need a miracle to get anything that didn’t come from a great big clodhopping welly, but somehow, believe it or not, they managed not to wreck the entire scene. My lovely lads found handprints. Three of them. In blood.”

“You gems,” I said. A couple of the techs nodded to me. Their rhythm was starting to slow: they were getting near the end, gearing down to make sure they missed nothing. All of them looked tired.

“Keep your powder dry,” Larry told me. “That’s not the good bit. I hate to break it to you, but your fella wore gloves.”

“Shit,” I said. Even the most moronic criminal knows to wear gloves, these days, but you always pray for the exception, the one so carried away on his surge of desire that everything else gets washed out of his mind.

“Don’t be complaining, you. At least we’ve found you proof that someone else was in this house last night. Here was me thinking that counted for something.”

“It counts for a lot.” The memory of me upstairs in Pat’s bedroom, blithely dumping everything on his shoulders, slapped me with a rush of disgust. “We won’t hold the gloves against you, Lar. I’m sticking to my story: you’re a gem.”

“Well, of course I am. Come here and have a look.”

The first handprint was a palm and five fingertips, at shoulder-height on one of the plate-glass windows looking out over the back garden. Larry said, “See the texture to it, those little dots? Leather. Big hands, too. This wasn’t some little runt of a guy.”

The second print was wrapped around the top edge of the children’s bookcase, like our man had grabbed hold of it to keep his balance. The third one was flat on the yellow paint of the computer desk, next to the faint outline where the computer had stood, like he had rested a hand on there while he took his time reading what was on the screen.

I said, “And that’s what we came down to ask you about. That computer: did you pull any prints off it, before you sent it back to the lab?”

“We tried. You’d think a keyboard would be the dream surface, wouldn’t you? You’d be so wrong. People don’t use a whole fingertip to hit the key, just a tiny fraction of the surface, and then it gets hit over and over at slightly different angles… It’s like taking a piece of paper and printing a hundred different words on it, one on top of the other, and then expecting us to work out the sentence they came from. Your best bet is the mouse-we got a couple of partials that might be almost usable. Apart from that, nothing big enough or clear enough to hold up in court.”

“What about blood? On the keyboard or the mouse, specifically?”

Larry shook his head. “There was some spatter on the monitor, a couple of drops on the side of the keyboard. No smudges on the keys or the mouse, though. No one used them with blood on his fingers, if that’s what you’re asking.”

I said, “So it looks like the computer came before the murders-before the adults, anyway. That’s some nerve he’s got, if he sat here playing with their internet history while they were asleep upstairs.”

“The computer didn’t have to come first,” Richie said. “Those gloves-they were leather, they’d have been stiff, specially if they were all bloody. Maybe he couldn’t type in them, took them off; they’d kept the blood off his fingers…”

Most rookies on their first outings keep their mouths shut and nod at whatever I say. Usually this is the right call, but every once in a while, watching other partners argue and bat theories back and forth and call each other every shade of stupid gives me a flash of something that could be loneliness. It was starting to feel good, working with Richie. “Then he sat there playing with Pat and Jenny’s internet history while they were bleeding out four feet from him,” I said. “Some nerve, either way.”

“Hello?” Larry inquired, waving at us. “Remember me? Remember how I told you the handprints weren’t the good bit?”

“I like saving my dessert for last,” I said. “Whenever you’re ready, Larry, we would love the good bit.”

He got each of us by an elbow and turned us towards the sweep of congealing blood. “Here’s where the male victim was, amn’t I right? Face down, head towards the hall door, feet towards the window. According to your buffaloes, the female was to his left, lying on her left side facing him, propped against his body, with her head on his upper arm. And here, just about eighteen inches from where her back would have been, we have this.”

He pointed to the floor, to the Jackson Pollock gibber of blood that radiated out around the puddle. I said, “A shoeprint?”

“Actually, a couple of hundred shoeprints, God help us. But take a look at this one here.”

Richie and I bent closer. The print was so faint I could barely see it against the marbled pattern of the tiles, but Larry and his boys see things the rest of us don’t.

“This one,” Larry said, “is special. It’s a print from a man’s left runner, size ten or eleven, made in blood. And get this: it doesn’t belong to either of the uniforms, it doesn’t belong to either of the paramedics-some people have the brains to wear their shoe covers-and it doesn’t belong to either of your victims.”

The swell of satisfaction practically burst his boiler suit. He had every right to be pleased. “Larry,” I said, “I think I love you.”

“Take a number. I don’t want to get your hopes up too high, though. For one thing, it’s only half a print-one of your buffaloes obliterated the other half-and for another, unless your fella’s a total eejit, that shoe’s at the bottom of the Irish Sea by now. But if you should somehow get your hands on it, here’s where the luck comes in: this print is perfect. I couldn’t take a better one myself. When we get the pics back to the lab, we’ll be able to tell you the size and, if you give us enough time, very possibly the make and model. Find me the actual shoe, and I’ll have it matched for you inside a minute.”

I said, “Thanks, Larry. You were right, as always: that’s a good bit.”

I had caught Richie’s eye and started moving towards the door, but Larry batted me on the arm. “Did I say I was done? Now this is preliminary, Scorch, you know the drill, don’t quote me on any of this or I may have to divorce you. But you said you wanted anything we could give you about what the struggle could have looked like.”

“Don’t I always? All contributions gratefully accepted.”

“It’s looking like the fight was confined to this room, just like you thought. In here, though, it was full-on. It went the whole width of the room-well, you can tell that yourselves from the way the place is wrecked, but I mean the part after the stabbing started. We’ve got a beanbag right over there at the far side that’s been slashed open by a bloody knife, we’ve got a big spray of blood spatter on the wall on this side, above the table, and we’ve counted at least nine separate sprays in between.” Larry pointed and the sprays leapt out from the wall at me, suddenly vivid as paint. “Some of those probably come from the male vic’s arm-you heard Cooper, it was bleeding all over the place; if he swings his arm to defend himself, he’s going to throw off blood-and some of them probably come from your boy swinging his weapon. Between the two of them, anyway, an awful lot of swinging went on. And the sprays are at different levels, different angles: your boy was stabbing while the vics were fighting back, while they were on the ground…”

Richie’s shoulder jumped; he tried to cover it by scratching like something had bitten him. Larry said, almost gently, “It’s actually a big plus. The messier the fight, the more evidence gets left behind: prints, hairs, fibers… Give me a nice bloody scene any day.”

I pointed to the door into the hallway. “What about over there? Did they get anywhere near there?”

Larry shook his head. “Doesn’t look like it. Not a sausage within about four feet of that door: no spatter, no bloody footprints except the uniforms’ and the paramedics’, nothing out of place. All just as God and the decorators intended.”

“Is there a phone in here? A cordless, maybe?”

“Not that we’ve found.”

I said, to Richie, “You see what I’m getting at.”

“Yeah. The landline was out on the hall table.”

“Right. Why didn’t Patrick or Jennifer go for it and hit 999, or at least try to? How did he restrain both of them at once?”

Richie shrugged. His eyes were still moving across the end wall, from blood spray to blood spray. “You heard your woman Gogan,” he said. “We don’t have a great rep around this estate. They could’ve figured there was no point.”

The image pressed up against the inside of my skull: Pat and Jenny Spain throat-deep in terror, believing that we were too far away and too indifferent even to be worth calling, that all the world’s protections had deserted them; that it was just the two of them, with the dark and the sea roaring up on every side, on their own against a man with a knife in one hand and their children’s deaths in the other. Going by the tight movement of Richie’s jaw, he was picturing the same thing. I said, “Another possibility is two separate struggles. Our man does his thing upstairs, and then either Pat or Jenny wakes up and hears him on his way out-Pat would add up better, Jenny would be less likely to go investigating on her own. He goes after the guy, catches him in here, tries to hang onto him. That would explain the weapon of opportunity, and the extent of the struggle: our man’s trying to get a big, strong, furious guy off of him. The fight wakes Jenny, but by the time she gets here, our man’s taken Pat down, leaving him free to deal with her. The whole thing could have gone very fast. It doesn’t take that long to make this kind of mess, not when there’s a blade involved.”

Richie said, “That’d make the kids the main targets.”

“It’s looking that way anyhow. The children’s murders are organized, neat: there was some kind of plan there, and everything went according to that plan. The adults were a bloody, out-of-control mess that could easily have ended very differently. Either he wasn’t planning to cross paths with the adults at all, or he had a plan for them, too, and something went wrong. Either way, he started with the kids. That tells me they were probably his main priority.”

“Or else,” Richie said, “it could be the other way round.” His eyes had slipped away from me again, back to the chaos. “The adults were the main target, or one of them was, and the bloody mess was the plan all along; that’s what he was after. The kids were just something he had to get rid of, so they wouldn’t wake up and get in the way of the good stuff.”

Larry had delicately worked one finger under his hood and was scratching where his hairline should have been. He was getting bored-all the psychological chitchat. “Wherever he started, I’d say he finished up by leaving through the back door, not the front. The hall is clean, so’s the drive, but we found three blood smears on the paving stones in the back garden.” He beckoned us towards the window and pointed: neat strips of yellow tape, one just outside the door, two by the edge of the grass. “The surface is uneven, so we’re not going to be able to tell you what kind of smears-they could be shoe prints, or transfer where someone dropped a bloody object, or they could be droplets that got smudged somehow, like if he was bleeding and then stepped on the blood. One of the kids could have scraped its knee days ago, for all we know at this stage. All we’re saying is, there they are.”

I said, “So he’s got a back door key.”

“That or a teleporter. And we found one other thing in the garden that I thought you might want to know about. What with the trap in the attic and all.”

Larry wiggled his fingers at one of his boys, who picked an evidence bag off a pile and held it out. “If you’re not interested,” he said, “we’ll just bin it. Disgusting object.”

It was a robin, or most of one. Something had taken its head off, a couple of days back. There were pale things curling in the ragged dark hole.

“We’re interested,” I said. “Any way you can work out what killed it?”

“Really and truly not my area, but one of the boys back at the lab does outdoorsy things at weekends. Tracks badgers in his moccasins, or whatever. I’ll see what he says.”

Richie was leaning in for a closer look at the robin: tiny clenched claws, crumbs of earth hanging from the bright breast feathers. It was starting to stink, but he didn’t seem to notice. He said, “Most things, if they killed it they’d eat it. Cats, foxes, anything like that: they’d have had the guts out of it. They don’t kill for the sake of it.”

“I wouldn’t have taken you for the woodsman type,” Larry said, arching an eyebrow.

Richie shrugged. “I’m not. I was posted down the country for a while, in Galway. Picked bits up from listening to the local lads.”

“Go on, then, Crocodile Dundee. What would take the head off a robin and leave the rest?”

“Mink, maybe? Pine marten?”

I said, “Or human.” It wasn’t the trap in the attic I had thought of, the second I saw what was left of that robin. It was Emma and Jack bouncing out into the garden to play, early one morning, and finding this, all among the grass and the dew. From that hide, someone would have had a perfect view. “Those kill for the sake of it, all the time.”

By twenty to six, we were working our way through the playroom area and the light outside the kitchen windows was starting to cool towards evening. I said to Richie, “Can you finish up here?”

He glanced up, didn’t ask. “No probs.”

“I’ll be back in fifteen minutes. Be ready to head back to HQ.” I stood up-my knees jolted and cracked, I was getting too old for this-and left him crouching there, rummaging through picture books and plastic tubs of crayons, surrounded by the blood spatter that Larry and his team had no more use for. As I left my foot knocked over some kind of blue fluffy animal, which let out a high-pitched giggle and started to sing. Its thin, sweet, inhuman chant followed me down the hall and out the door.

As the day started to ebb, the estate was coming to life. The media had packed up and gone home, taking their helicopter with them, but in the house where we had talked to Fiona Rafferty a clutch of little boys were ricocheting about, swinging off the scaffolding and pretending to shove each other out of high windows, dancing black silhouettes against the burning sky. At the end of the road a huddle of teenagers were slouching on the wall around a weed-grown garden, not even pretending not to be smoking or drinking or staring at me. Somewhere someone was roaring furious circles on a big bike with no muffler; farther away, rap was pumping relentlessly. Birds dived in and out of empty window-holes, and by the roadside something scuttled in a heap of bricks and barbed wire, setting off a tiny avalanche of dust.

The back entrance of the estate was two great stone gateposts, opening onto a sweep of swaying long grass that had grown up thick in the gap where the gate should have been. The grass whispered soothingly and clamped tight around my ankles, tugging me back, as I moved down the gentle slope towards the sand dunes.

The search team was at the tide line, picking through seaweed and the bubbling holes where winkles were buried. They straightened up, one by one, when they saw me coming. I said, “Any luck?”

They showed me their haul of evidence bags, like cold children straggling home with their finds at the end of a long day on some grotesque scavenger hunt. Cigarette butts, cider cans, used condoms, broken earphones, ripped T-shirts, food packets, old shoes: every empty house had had something to offer, every empty house had been claimed and colonized by someone-kids looking for places to dare each other, couples looking for privacy or for thrills, teenagers looking for something to wreck, creatures looking for somewhere to breed and grow, mice, rats, birds, weeds, tiny busy insects. Nature doesn’t let anything go empty, doesn’t let anything go to waste. The second the builders and developers and estate agents had moved out, other things had started moving in.

There were a few finds worth having: two blades-a broken penknife, probably too small to be ours, and a switchblade that could have been interesting except that it was half rusted away-three door keys that would need checking against the Spains’ locks, a scarf with a stiff dark patch that might turn out to be blood. “Good stuff,” I said. “Hand it all over to Boyle from the Bureau, and go home. At eight A.M. sharp, pick up where you left off. I’ll be at the post-mortems, but I’ll join you as soon as I can. Thank you, ladies and gentlemen. Nice work.”

They trudged up through the dunes towards the estate, pulling off gloves and rubbing at stiff necks. I stayed where I was. The team would assume I was taking a still moment to think about the case, working through the dark maths of the probabilities or letting small dead faces have their time to fill my mind. If our man was watching me, he would figure the same thing. I wasn’t. I had budgeted these ten minutes into the day’s schedule, to test myself against that beach.

I kept my back to the estate, all that strafed hope where there used to be bright swimming costumes fluttering on makeshift washing lines between caravans. There was an early moon, pale against the pale sky, flickering behind slim smoky clouds; below it the sea was gray and restless, insistent. Seabirds were reclaiming the tide line, now that the searchers were gone; I stood still, and after a few minutes they forgot me and went back to their skittering search for food and to their calls, high and clean as wind in fretted rock. Once, when a night bird’s squeal close outside the caravan window startled Dina awake, my mother quoted Shakespeare for her: Be not afraid; the isle is full of noises: sounds and sweet airs that give delight and hurt not.

The wind had grown a cold edge; I turned up my coat collar and dug my hands into my pockets. The last time I set foot on that beach, I had been fifteen: just starting to shave like I meant it, just getting used to my brand-new shoulders, just a week into going out with someone for the first time, a golden girl from Newry called Amelia who laughed at all my jokes and tasted like strawberries. I was different, back then: electric and reckless, body-slamming headlong onto any chance of a laugh or a dare, made out of enough momentum to shoot me straight through stone walls. When we guys arm-wrestled to impress the girls, I took on big Dean Gorry and beat him three times running, even though he was twice my size, because that was how badly I wanted to make Amelia clap for me.

I looked out over the water, into the night that was coming in on the tide, and I felt nothing at all. The beach looked like something I had seen in an old film, once upon a time; that hotheaded boy felt like a character from some book I had read and given away in childhood. Only, somewhere far inside my spine and deep in the palms of my hands, something hummed; like a sound too low to hear, like a warning, like a cello string when a tuning fork strikes the perfect tone to call it awake.