Broken Harbour

7

And of course, of bloody fucking course, Dina was waiting for me.

The first thing you notice about my little sister Dina is that she’s the kind of beautiful that makes people, men and women both, forget what they were talking about when she came in. She looks like one of those old pen-and-ink sketches of fairies: slight as a dancer, with skin that never tans, full pale lips and huge blue eyes. She walks like she’s skimming an inch above the ground. This artist she used to go out with once told her she was “pure pre-Raphaelite,” which would have been cuter if he hadn’t dumped her flat on her arse two weeks later. Not that this came as a surprise. The second thing that stands out about Dina is that she is crazy as a bag of cats. Various therapists and psychiatrists have diagnosed various things along the way, but what it comes down to is that Dina is no good at life. It takes a knack that she’s never quite got hold of. She can fake it for months at a stretch, sometimes even a year, but it takes concentration like she’s tightrope walking, and in the end she always wobbles and goes flying. Then she ditches her lousy McJob du jour, her lousy boyfriend du jour ditches her-men who like them vulnerable love Dina, right up until she shows them what vulnerable actually means-and she turns up on my doorstep or Geri’s, generally at some ungodly hour of the morning, making bugger-all sense.

That night, to avoid becoming predictable, she showed up at my work instead. We work out of Dublin Castle, and since it’s a tourist attraction-eight hundred years’ worth of the buildings that have defended this city, in one way or another-anyone can walk straight in off the street. Richie and I were heading across the cobblestones towards the HQ building at a fast stride, and I was arranging the facts in my head ready to lay out for O’Kelly, when a slip of darkness detached itself from the corner of shadow by a wall and flew towards us. Both of us jumped. “Mikey,” Dina said, in a fierce undertone, fingers taut as wires clamping around my wrist. “You have to come get me now. Everyone keeps pushing.”

Last time I had seen her, maybe a month before, she had had long rippling fair hair and some kind of floating flowery dress. Since then she had gone grunge: her hair was dyed glossy black and chopped off in a flapper-style bob-the fringe looked like she might have done it herself-and she was wearing a huge, ragged gray cardigan over a white slip, and biker boots. It’s always a bad sign when Dina changes her look. I could have kicked myself for going so long without checking.

I moved her away from Richie, who was trying to get his jaw off the cobblestones. He looked like he was seeing me in a whole new light. “I’ve got you, sweetheart. What’s up?”

“I can’t, Mikey, I can feel stuff in my hair, you know, the wind scraping into my hair? It hurts, it keeps hurting, I can’t find the, not the off switch the button the way it stops.”

My stomach turned into one hard heavy lump. “OK,” I said. “OK. Do you need to come back to my place for a while, yeah?”

“We have to go. You have to listen.”

“We’re going, sweetheart. Just hang on for one second, OK?” I steered her to the steps of one of the castle buildings, closed up for the night after the day’s crop of tourists. “Sit there for me.”

“Why? Where are you going?”

She was on the edge of panicking. “Right over there,” I said, pointing. “I need to get rid of my partner, so you and I can head home. It’ll take me two seconds.”

“I don’t want your partner. Mikey, there won’t be room, how are we going to squash the fit?”

“Exactly. I don’t want him either. I’ll just send him on his merry way, and then we can get going.” I sat her down on the steps. “OK?”

Dina pulled her knees up and shoved her mouth into the crook of her elbow. “OK,” she said, muffled. “Come on, OK?”

Richie was pretending to check his phone messages, to give me privacy. I kept one eye on Dina. “Listen, Richie. I may not be able to make tonight. Are you still on for it?”

I could see the question marks bouncing up and down in his head, but he knew when to keep his mouth shut. “Sure.”

“Good. Pick a floater. He-or she, if you want Whatshername-can put in for overtime, although you might try to get across the message that waiving it would be a better career move. If anything goes down out there, you ring me at once. It doesn’t matter if you think it’s unimportant, it doesn’t matter if you think you can handle it, you ring me. Got that?”

“Got it.”

“In fact, if nothing goes down, ring me anyway, just so I know I’m up to speed. Every hour, on the hour. If I don’t pick up, you keep ringing till I do. Got it?”

“Got it.”

“Tell the Super I had an emergency but not to worry, I’ll have it under control and be back on the job by tomorrow morning at the latest. Brief him on today and on our plans for tonight-can you do that?”

“I can probably manage that, yeah.”

The twist to the corner of Richie’s mouth said he didn’t appreciate the question, but his ego was low on my priority list right then. “No ‘probably,’ old son: manage it. Tell him the floaters have their assignments for tomorrow, so do the searchers, and we need a sub-aqua team to start work on the bay as early as possible. As soon as you’re done with him, get moving. You’ll need food, warm clothes, a packet of caffeine tabs-coffee’s no good, you don’t want to be pissing every half-hour-and a pair of thermal-imaging goggles: we have to assume this guy has some kind of night-vision gear, and I don’t want him getting the jump on you. And check your gun.” Most of us go a full career without ever unholstering. Some people take that as a license to get sloppy.

“Yeah, I’ve done a couple of stakeouts before,” Richie said, evenly enough that I couldn’t tell whether he was giving me the finger. “See you back here, tomorrow morning?”

Dina was getting antsy, biting off threads from the sleeve of her jumper. “No,” I said. “Not here. I’ll try to get out to Brianstown at some point tonight, but that may or may not happen. If I don’t make it, I’ll meet you down at the hospital for the post-mortems. Six A.M., and for God’s sake don’t be late, or we’ll spend the rest of the morning unknotting Cooper’s knickers.”

“No probs.” Richie pocketed his phone. “Might see you out there. Otherwise, we’ll just have to do our best not to fuck up, yeah?”

I said, “Don’t fuck up.”

“We won’t,” Richie said, more gently; he almost sounded like he was being reassuring. “Good luck.”

He gave me a nod and headed for the door of HQ. He was smart enough not to glance back. “Mikey,” Dina hissed, clutching a fistful of the back of my coat. “Can we go?”

I took a fraction of a second to look up at the dimming sky and throw out a hard urgent prayer to anything that was up there: Let my man have more restraint than I’m giving him credit for. Don’t let him go rushing into Richie’s arms. Make him wait for me.

“Come on,” I said, putting a hand on Dina’s shoulder-she shoved herself up against my side, all sharp elbows and fast breath, like a spooked animal. “Let’s go.”

The first thing you need to do with Dina on days like this is get her indoors. A big part of what looks like madness is actually just tension, free-floating terror growing bigger as it gets buffeted around in currents and hooks onto everything that drifts past: she ends up frozen rigid by the immensity and the unpredictability of the world, like a prey animal trapped in the open. Get her into a familiar enclosed space with no strangers, no loud noises and no sudden movements, and she calms down, even has long lucid patches, while the two of you wait it out together. Dina was one of the factors I kept in mind when I was buying my apartment, after my ex and I sold our house. We picked a good time to split, or so I keep telling myself: the property market was on its way up, and my half of the equity got me a deposit on a fourth-floor two-bed in the Financial Services Center. It’s central enough that I can walk to work, trendy enough that it made me feel a little less like a loser for failing at marriage, and high enough that Dina won’t be spooked by street noise.

“Yes thank God about time,” she said, on a wild rush of relief, when I unlocked the apartment. She shoved past me and pressed her back against the wall by the door, eyes closed, taking deep breaths. “Mike, I need a towel shower, can I?”

I found her a towel. She dumped her handbag on the floor, vanished into the bathroom and slammed the door behind her.

Dina on a bad one could stay in the shower all night, as long as the hot water doesn’t run out and she knows you’re outside the door. She says she feels better in water because it makes her mind go blank, which is crammed with so many kinds of Jung that I wouldn’t even know where to start. As soon as I heard the water running and her starting to sing to herself, I shut the living-room door and phoned Geri.

I hate making this call more than I hate almost anything in the world. Geri has three kids, ten and eleven and fifteen, a job doing the books for her best friend’s interior design company, and a husband she doesn’t see enough of. All those people need her. No one alive needs anything from me except Dina and Geri and my father, and what Geri needs most is for me not to make this phone call. I do everything in my power. It had been years since I had let her down.

“Mick! Hang on a sec for me, till I get this wash started-” Slam, click of buttons, mechanical hum. “Now. Is everything OK? Did you get my message?”

“Yeah, I got it. Geri-”

“Andrea! I saw that! You give it back to him right now or I’ll let him have your one, and you don’t want that, do you? No, you do not.”

“Geri. Listen to me. Dina’s losing it again. I have her over at my place, she’s taking a shower, but I’ve got stuff I have to do. Can I drop her down to you?”

“Oh, God…” I heard the breath leak out of her. Geri is our optimist: she still hopes, after twenty years of this, that every time will be the last, that one morning Dina will wake up cured. “Ah, God, the poor little thing. I’d love to take her, but not tonight. Maybe in a couple of days, if she’s still-”

“I can’t wait a couple of days, Geri. I’m on a big case, I’m going to be working eighteen-hour shifts for the foreseeable, and it’s not like I can bring her to work with me.”

“Oh, Mick, I can’t. Sheila’s got the stomach flu, that’s what I was telling you, she’s after giving it to her dad-the two of them were up all night getting sick, if it wasn’t one it was the other-and I’d say Colm and Andrea’ll come down with it any minute. I’ve been cleaning up sick and doing washing and boiling 7-Up all day, and it looks like I’ll be doing the same again tonight. I couldn’t manage Dina as well. I couldn’t.”

Dina’s episodes last anywhere between three days and two weeks. I keep some of my annual leave saved up just in case, and O’Kelly doesn’t ask, but that wasn’t going to work this time. I said, “What about Dad? Just for once. Couldn’t he…?”

Geri left the silence there. When I was a kid Dad was straight-backed and lean, given to clean, square-edged statements with no wiggle room: Women may fancy a drinking man, but they’ll never respect him. There’s no bad mood that fresh air and exercise can’t mend. Always pay a debt before it’s due and you’ll never go hungry. He could fix anything, grow anything, cook and clean and iron like a professional when he had to. Mum dying blew him right out of the water. He still lives in the house in Terenure where we grew up. Geri and I take turns calling down to him at the weekends, to clean the bathroom, put seven balanced meals in the freezer and check that the TV and the phone are still working. The kitchen wallpaper is the acid-trip orange swirl that Mum picked out in the seventies; in my room, my schoolbooks are dog-eared and cobwebbed on the bookshelf Dad made for me. Go into the sitting room and ask him a question: after a few seconds he’ll turn from the telly, blink at you, say, “Son. Good to see you,” and go back to watching Australian soap operas with the sound turned down. Occasionally, when he gets restless, he extracts himself from the sofa and shuffles around the back garden a few times, in his slippers.

I said, “Geri, please. It’s only for the night. She’ll sleep all day tomorrow, and I’m hoping I’ll have work sorted out by tomorrow evening. Please.”

“I would if I could, Mick. It’s not that I’m too busy, you know I wouldn’t mind that…” The background noise had faded: she had moved away from the kids, for privacy. I pictured her in their dining room strewn with bright jumpers and homework, tugging a strand of blond out of its careful weekly set. We both knew I wouldn’t have suggested our father unless I was desperate. “But you know how she goes if you don’t stay with her every minute, and I’ve Sheila and Phil to look after… What would I do if one of them started getting sick in the middle of the night? Just leave them to clean up their own mess? Or leave her and have her start carrying on, wake the house?”

I let my shoulders slump back against the wall and ran a hand over my face. My apartment felt airless, stuffed with the reek of whatever fake-lemon chemicals the cleaner uses. “Yeah,” I said. “I know. Don’t worry about it.”

“Mick. If we can’t cope… Maybe we should think about somewhere that can.”

“No,” I said. It came out sharp enough that I flinched, but Dina’s singing didn’t pause. “I can cope. It’ll be fine.”

“Will you be all right? Can you get someone to sub for you?”

“That’s not how it works. I’ll figure something out.”

“Oh, Mick, I’m sorry. I’m really sorry. As soon as they’re a bit better-”

“It’s OK. Tell them both I was asking for them, and you try not to catch whatever they’ve got. We’ll talk soon.”

A distant yell of fury, somewhere on Geri’s end. “Andrea! What did I say to you?… Sure, Mick, Dina might be better herself by the morning, mightn’t she? You never know your luck.”

“She might, yeah. We’ll hope.” Dina yelped, and the shower shut off: the hot water had run out. “Gotta go,” I said. “Take care,” and I had the phone stashed away and myself neatly arranged in the kitchen, chopping vegetables, by the time the bathroom door opened.

I made myself a beef stir-fry for dinner-Dina wasn’t hungry. The shower had settled her: she curled up on the sofa, wearing a T-shirt and sweatpants that she had taken out of my wardrobe, gazing into space and rubbing dreamily at her hair with a towel. “Shh,” she said, when I started to ask delicately about her day. “Don’t talk. Listen. Isn’t it beautiful?”

All I could hear was the muttering of traffic, four floors down, and the synthesized tinkle of the music that the couple upstairs play every night to send their baby to sleep. I supposed it was peaceful, in its own way, and after a day keeping hold of every thread in that tangle of conversations, it was good to cook and eat in silence. I would have liked to catch the news, to see how the reporters were spinning things, but that was out.

After dinner I brewed coffee, a lot of it. The sound of the beans grinding sent Dina off on a fresh fidget: padding restless barefoot circles around the living room, taking books off my shelves and flipping the pages and putting them back in the wrong places. “Were you supposed to be going out tonight?” she asked, with her back to me. “Like on a date or something?”

“It’s Tuesday. No one goes on dates on Tuesdays.”

“God, Mikey, get some spontaneity. Go out on school nights. Go wild.”

I poured myself a mug of espresso strength and headed for my armchair. “I don’t think I’m the spontaneous type.”

“Well, does that mean you go on dates at the weekends? Like, you’ve got a girlfriend?”

“I don’t think I’ve called anyone my girlfriend since I was twenty. Adults have partners.”

Dina mimed sticking two fingers down her throat, with sound effects. “Middle-aged gay guys in 1995 have partners. Are you going out with anyone? Are you shagging anyone? Are you giving anyone a blast from the yogurt bazooka? Are you-”

“No, Dina, I’m not. I was seeing someone until recently, we broke up, I’m not planning on getting back in the saddle for a while. OK?”

“I didn’t know,” Dina said, a lot more quietly. “Sorry.” She subsided onto one arm of the sofa. “Do you still talk to Laura?” she asked, after a moment.

“Sometimes.” Hearing Laura’s name filled up the room with her perfume, sharp and sweet. I took a big swallow of coffee to get it out of my nose.

“Are you guys going to get back together?”

“No. She’s seeing someone. A doctor. I’m expecting her to ring me any day to tell me that they’re engaged.”

“Ahhh,” Dina said, disappointed. “I like Laura.”

“So do I. That’s why I married her.”

“So why did you divorce her, then?”

“I didn’t divorce her. She divorced me.” Laura and I have always done the civilized thing and told people the breakup was mutual, nobody’s fault, we grew in different directions and all the usual meaningless rubbish, but I was too tired.

“Seriously? Why?”

“Because. I don’t have the energy tonight, Dina.”

“Whatever,” Dina said, rolling her eyes. She slid sinuously off the sofa and padded into the kitchen, where I heard her opening things. “Why don’t you have anything to eat? I’m starving.”

“There’s plenty to eat. The fridge is full. I can make you a stir-fry, or there’s lamb stew in the freezer, or if you want something lighter you can have porridge, or-”

“Ew, please. I don’t mean stuff like that. Fuck the five food groups and antioxidant blah blah blah. I want like ice cream, or one of those shitty burgers you stick in the microwave.” A cupboard door slammed and she came back into the living room holding out a granola bar at arm’s length. “Granola? What are you, a girl?”

“No one’s making you eat it.”

She shrugged, threw herself on the sofa again and started nibbling a corner of the bar, making a face like it might poison her. She said, “When you were with Laura you were happy. It was sort of weird, because you’re not one of those naturally happy people, so I wasn’t used to seeing you that way. It actually took me a while to figure out what was going on. But it was nice.”

I said, “Yes, it was.”

Laura is the same kind of sleek, highlighted, labor-intensive pretty as Jennifer Spain. She was on a diet every day I knew her, except birthdays and Christmases; she tops up her fake tan every three days, straightens her hair every morning of her life, and never goes out of the house without full makeup. I know some men like women to leave themselves the way nature intended, or at least to pretend they do, but the gallantry with which Laura fought nature hand to hand was one of the many things I loved about her. I used to get up fifteen or twenty minutes early in the mornings so I could spend that time just watching her get ready. Even on days when she was running late, dropping things and swearing to herself, for me it was the most restful thing life had to offer, like watching a cat put the world in order by washing itself. It always seemed to me that a girl like that, a girl who worked that hard at being what she was supposed to be, was likely to want what she was supposed to want: flowers, good jewelry, a nice house, holidays in the sun, and a man who would love her and put his heart into taking care of her for the rest of their lives. Girls like Fiona Rafferty are complete mysteries to me; I can’t imagine where you would start trying to figure them out, and that makes me nervous. With Laura, it seemed to me that I had a chance at making her happy. It was moronic of me to be taken by surprise when she, with whom I had felt safe for exactly that reason, turned out to want precisely what women are supposed to want.

Dina said, without looking at me, “Was it because of me? That Laura dumped you?”

“No,” I said, instantly. It was true. Laura found out about Dina early on, in much the way you would expect. She never once said or hinted, I believe she never once thought, that Dina wasn’t my responsibility, that I should keep her crazy out of our home. When I came to bed, late on nights when Dina was finally asleep in our spare room, Laura would stroke my hair. That was all.

Dina said, “Nobody wants to deal with this shit. I don’t want to deal with this shit.”

“Maybe some women wouldn’t. They’re not women I’d marry.”

She snorted. “I said I liked Laura. I didn’t say I thought she was a saint. How stupid do you think I am? I know she didn’t want some crazy bitch showing up on her doorstep, fucking up her whole week. That one time, candles, music, wineglasses, both of your hair all messed up? She must have hated my guts.”

“She didn’t. She never has.”

“You wouldn’t tell me if she did. Why else would she have dumped you? Laura was mad about you. And it’s not like it was your fault, like you hit her or called her a slag, I know how you treated her, like some kind of princess. You’d have brought her the moon. Her or me, did she say that? I want my life back, get that loony out of here?”

She was starting to wind tight, her back pressed against the arm of the sofa. There was a flare of fear in her eyes.

I said, “Laura left me because she wants children.”

Dina stopped in mid-breath and stared, open-mouthed. “Oh, shit, Mikey. Can you not have kids?”

“I don’t know. We didn’t try.”

“Then…?”

“I don’t want to have children. I never have.”

Dina thought about that in silence, sucking her granola bar absently. After a while she said, “Laura would probably chill out a lot if she had kids.”

“Maybe. I hope she gets the chance to find out. But it was never going to be with me. Laura knew that when she married me. I made sure she did. I never misled her.”

“Why don’t you want kids?”

“Some people don’t. It doesn’t make me a freak.”

“I didn’t call you a freak. Did I call you a freak? I just asked why.”

I said, “I don’t believe in Murder Ds having kids. They turn you soft: you can’t take the heat any more, and you end up making a bollix of the job and probably the kids too. You can’t have both. I’ll take the job.”

“Oh my God, great big bullshit. Nobody doesn’t have kids because they don’t believe in it. You always blame everything on your job, it’s so boring, you have no idea. Why don’t you want kids?”

“I don’t blame things on my job. I take it seriously. If that’s boring, I apologize.”

Dina rolled her eyes and did a huge fake-patient sigh. “OK,” she said, slowing down so that the idiot could keep up. “I’d bet everything I’ve got, which is fuck-all but there you go, that your entire squad doesn’t get sterilized their first day on the job. You work with guys who have kids. They do the exact same job you do. They can’t be letting murderers go all the time, or they’d get fired. Right? Am I right?”

“Some of the guys have families. Yeah.”

“Then why don’t you want kids?”

The coffee was kicking in. The apartment felt small and ugly, harsh with artificial light; the urge to get out, start driving too fast back to Broken Harbor, nearly launched me right out of my chair. I said, “Because the risk is too big. It’s so enormous that just thinking about it makes me want to puke my guts. That’s why.”

“The risk,” Dina said, after a moment’s silence. She turned the wrapper of the granola bar inside out, carefully, and examined the shiny side. “Not from the job. You mean me. That they’d turn out like me.”

I said, “You’re not who I’m worried about.”

“Then who?”

“Me.”

Dina watched me, the lightbulb reflecting tiny twin will-o’-the-wisps in those inscrutable milky blue eyes. She said, “You’d make a good father.”

“I think I probably would. But probably’s not good enough. Because if we’re both wrong and I turned out to be a terrible father, what then? There would be absolutely nothing I could do. Once you find out, it’s too late: the kids are there, you can’t send them back. All you can do is keep on fucking them up, day after day, and watch while these perfect babies turn into wrecks in front of your eyes. I can’t do it, Dina. Either I’m not stupid enough or I’m not brave enough, but I can’t take that risk.”

“Geri’s doing OK.”

“Geri’s doing great,” I said. Geri is cheerful, easygoing, and a natural at motherhood. After each of her kids was born, I rang her every day for a year-stakeouts, interrogations, fights with Laura, everything else in the world got put on hold for that phone call-to make sure she was all right. Once she sounded hoarse and subdued enough that I made Phil leave work and check on her. She had a cold and obviously thought I should feel like an idiot, which I didn’t. Better safe, always.

“I want kids someday,” Dina said. She balled up the wrapper, threw it in the general direction of the bin and missed. “I bet you think that’s a really shit idea.”

The thought of her showing up pregnant next time made my scalp freeze. “You don’t need my permission.”

“But you think it anyway.”

I asked, “How’s Fabio?”

“His name’s Francesco. I don’t think it’s going to work out. I don’t know.”

“I think it would be a better idea to wait to have kids until you’re with someone you can rely on. Call me old-fashioned.”

“You mean, in case I lose it. In case I’m minding this little tiny three-week-old baby and my head starts to explode. Someone should be there to watch me.”

“That’s not what I said.”

Dina stretched out her legs on the sofa and inspected her toenail polish, which was pearly pale blue. She said, “I can tell when I’m going, you know. Do you want to know how?”

I don’t want to know anything, ever, about the inner workings of Dina’s mind. I said, “How?”

“Things start sounding all wrong.” A quick glance at me, under cover of her hair. “Like I take off my top at night and drop it on the floor, and it goes plop, like a rock falling into a pond. Or once I was walking home from work and my boots, every time my boots hit the ground they squealed, like a mouse in a trap. It was horrible. In the end I had to sit down on the footpath and take them off, to make sure there wasn’t a mouse stuck inside-I did know there wasn’t, I’m not stupid, but just to make sure. I figured it out then; what was happening, I mean. But I still had to take a taxi home. I couldn’t stand hearing that, all the way. It sounded like it was in agony.”

“Dina. You should go to someone about it. As soon as it happens.”

“I do go to someone. Today I was in work and I opened one of the big freezers to get more bagels, and it crackled; like a fire, like there was a forest fire in there. So I walked out and came to you.”

“Which is great. I’m delighted you did. But I’m talking about a professional.”

“Doctors,” Dina said, with her lip curling. “I’ve lost count. And how much use have they ever been?”

She was alive, which counted for a lot to me and which I felt should count for at least something to her, but before I could point that out, my mobile rang. As I went for it, I checked my watch: nine on the dot, good man Richie. “Kennedy,” I said, getting up and moving away from Dina.

“We’re in place,” Richie said, so softly I had to press my ear to the phone. “No movement.”

“Techs and floaters doing their thing?”

“Yeah.”

“Any problems? Run into anyone along the way? Anything I should know?”

“Nah. We’re good.”

“Then we’ll talk in an hour, or sooner if there’s any action. Good luck.”

I hung up. Dina was twisting the towel into a tight knot and watching me sharply, through that wing of glossy hair. “Who was that?”

“Work.” I pocketed the mobile, inside pocket. Dina’s mind has paranoid corners. I didn’t want her hiding my phone so that I couldn’t discuss her with imaginary hospitals, or, even better, answering it and telling Richie that she knew what he was up to and she hoped he died of cancer.

“I thought you were off.”

“I am. More or less.”

“What’s ‘more or less’ supposed to mean?”

Her hands were starting to tense up on the towel. I said, keeping my voice easy, “It means that sometimes people need to ask me something. There’s no such thing as ‘off ’ in Murder. That was my partner. He’ll probably ring a few more times tonight.”

“Why?”

I got my coffee mug and headed for the kitchen to top up. “You saw him. He’s a rookie. Before he makes any big decisions, he needs to check with me.”

“Big decisions about what?”

“Anything.”

Dina started using one thumbnail to pick at a scab on the back of her other hand, in short hard scrapes. “Someone was listening to the radio this afternoon,” she said. “In work.”

Oh, shit. “And?”

“And. It said there was a dead body, and police were treating the death as suspicious. It said Broken Harbor. They had some guy talking, some cop. It sounded like you.”

And then the freezer had started making forest-fire noises. I said carefully, taking a seat in my armchair again, “OK.”

The scraping picked up force. “Don’t do that. Don’t bloody do that.”

“Do what?”

“Put on that face, that stupid poker-up-your-arse cop face. Talk like I’m some idiot witness you can play little games with because I’m too intimidated to call you on it. You don’t intimidate me. Do you get that?”

There was no point in arguing. I said calmly, “Got it. I’m not going to try to intimidate you.”

“Then stop fucking about and tell me.”

“You know I can’t discuss work. It’s not personal.”

“Jesus, how the hell is this not personal? I’m your sister. How much more personal does it get?”

She was jammed tight into her corner of the sofa, feet braced like she was getting ready to come flying at me, which was unlikely but not impossible. I said, “True enough. I meant I’m not hiding anything from you personally. I have to be discreet with everyone.”

Dina chewed at the back of her forearm and watched me like I was her enemy, narrowed eyes alight with cold animal cunning. “OK,” she said. “So let’s just watch the news.”

I had been hoping that wouldn’t occur to her. “I thought you liked the peace and quiet.”

“If it’s public enough that the whole damn country can see it, surely to jumping Jesus it can’t be too confidential for me to watch. Right? Considering that it’s not personal.”

“For God’s sake, Dina. I’ve been in work all day. The last thing I want to do is come home and look at work on TV.”

“Then tell me what the fucking fuck is going on. Or I’m going to turn on the news and you’ll have to hold me down to stop me. Do you want to do that?”

“All right,” I said, hands going up. “OK. I’ll give you the story, if you’ll calm down for me. That means you need to stop biting your arm.”

“It’s my bloody arm. What do you care whose business is it?”

“I can’t concentrate while you’re doing that. And as long as I can’t concentrate, I can’t tell you what’s going on. It’s up to you.”

She shot me a defiant glare, bared small white teeth and bit down once more, hard, but when I didn’t react she wiped her arm on her T-shirt and sat on her hands. “There. Happy?”

I said, “It wasn’t just one body. It was a family of four. They were living out in Broken Harbor-it’s called Brianstown now. Someone broke into their house last night.”

“How’d he kill them?”

“We won’t be sure till the post-mortem. It looks like he used a knife.”

Dina stared at nothing and didn’t move, didn’t even breathe, while she thought that over. “Brianstown,” she said finally, abstractedly. “What a stupid fucking cretin name. Whoever came up with that, someone should push his head underneath a lawn mower and hold it there. Are you positive?”

“About the name?”

“No! Je-sus. About the dead people.”

I rubbed at the hinge of my jaw, trying to work some of the tension out of it. “Yeah. I’m positive.”

The focus had come back into her eyes: they were on me, unblinking. “You’re positive because you’re working on it.”

I didn’t answer.

“You said you didn’t want to look at it on the news because you’d been working on it all day. That’s what you said.”

“Looking at a murder case is work. Any murder case. That’s what I do.”

“Blah blah blah whatever, this murder case is your work. Right?”

“What difference does that make?”

“It makes a difference because if you tell me, I’ll let you change the subject.”

I said, “Yeah. I’m on the case. Me and a bunch of other detectives.”

“Hmm,” Dina said. She threw the towel in the general direction of the bathroom door, slid off the sofa and started moving around the room again, forceful automatic circles. I could almost hear the hum of the thing that lives inside her starting to build, a thin mosquito whine.

I said, “And now we change the subject.”

“Yeah,” Dina said. She picked up a little soapstone elephant that Laura and I brought back from holiday in Kenya one year, squeezed it hard and examined the red dents it left in her palm with interest. “I was thinking, before. While I was waiting for you. I want to change my flat.”

“Good,” I said. “We can go look for something online right now.” Dina’s flat is a shit hole. She could afford a perfectly decent place, I help her with the rent, but she says purpose-built apartment blocks make her want to bang her head off the walls, so she always ends up in some decrepit Georgian house that was converted into bedsits in the sixties, sharing a bathroom with some hairy loser who calls himself a musician and needs regular reminders that she has a cop for a brother.

“No,” Dina said. “Listen, for God’s sake. I want to change it like change it, I hate its guts because it itches. I already tried to move, went to the upstairs girls to ask them to swap, I mean it’s not like it’s going to itch them insides of the corners of their elbows and up their fingernails same as it does me. It’s not bugs, I’m you should take a look at how clean, I think it’s just that shitty carpet pattern. I told them that but those bitches wouldn’t listen, they got all goggle-mouthed, big stupid fish, I wonder if they have pet fish for pets? So since I can’t move out I have to change things, I want to move the rooms. I think we hammered them down before but I don’t remember, Mikey, do you did you?”

Richie rang every hour on the hour, just like he had promised, to tell me that more nothing had happened. Sometimes Dina let me answer on the first ring, chewed on one of her fingers while I talked and waited till I hung up before she kicked it up another gear: Who was that, what did he want, what did you tell him about me?… Sometimes I had to listen to it ring out two or three times, while she circled faster and talked louder to cover it, until she exhausted herself and slumped on the sofa or the carpet, and I could pick up. At one o’clock she slapped the phone out of my hand, voice rising towards a scream, when I went to answer: You don’t give a fucking I’m trying to tell you something, trying to talk to you, don’t you ignore me for that whoever, you listen listen listen…

Just after three she fell asleep on the sofa in midsentence, curled in a tight ball with her head burrowed between the cushions. She had the hem of my T-shirt wrapped around one fist and she was sucking on the cloth.

I got the duvet from the spare room and tucked it around her. Then I dimmed the lights, got a mug of cold coffee, and sat at the dining table playing solitaire on my phone. Far below us a truck beeped rhythmically, backing up; down the corridor a door slammed, muffled by the heavy carpeting. Dina whispered in her sleep. For a while it rained, a soft swish and patter at the windows, dimming back to silence.

I was fifteen, Geri was sixteen and Dina was almost six when our mother killed herself. For as long as I could remember, a part of me had been waiting for the day it would happen; with the cunning that comes to people whose minds have been stripped to one desire, she picked the only day we weren’t waiting for. All year round we took her as a full-time job, my father and Geri and me: watching like undercover agents for the first signs, coaxing her to eat when she wouldn’t get out of bed, hiding the painkillers on days when she drifted around the house like a cold spot in the air, holding her hand all night long when she couldn’t stop crying; lying as brightly and slickly as grifters to neighbors, relatives, anyone who asked. But for two weeks in the summer, all five of us were set free. Something about Broken Harbor-the air, the change of scenery, sheer determination not to ruin our holiday-changed my mother into a laughing girl lifting her palms to the sun, tentative and amazed, as if she couldn’t believe its tenderness on her skin. She ran races with us on the sand, kissed the back of my father’s neck when she rubbed in his sunscreen. For those two weeks, we didn’t count the sharp knives or sit bolt upright at the tiniest nighttime noise, because she was happy.

The summer I was fifteen, she was happiest of all. I didn’t understand why, until afterwards. She waited till the last night of our holiday before she walked into the water.

Up until that night Dina was a sparky little scrap of contrariness and mischief, always ready to explode into her high bubbling giggle and always able to pull you in too. Afterwards, the doctors warned us to watch her for “emotional consequences”-these days she would have been shot straight into therapy, probably we all would, but this was the eighties, and this country still thought therapy was for rich people who needed a good kick up the arse. We watched-we were good at that; at first we watched 24/7, took turns sitting by Dina’s bed while she twitched and murmured in her sleep-but she didn’t seem to be in any worse shape than me or Geri, and she definitely looked a lot better off than our father. She sucked her thumb, cried a lot. Over a long while she went back to normal, as far as we could see. The day she woke me by shoving a wet facecloth down my back and running away screaming with laughter, Geri lit a candle to the Blessed Virgin, in thanksgiving that Dina was back.

I lit one too. I held on to the positive as hard as I could and told myself I believed it. But I knew: a night like that one doesn’t just disappear. I was right. That night burrowed deep inside Dina’s softest spot and stayed curled up, biding its time, for years. When it had swollen fat enough, it stirred, woke up and ate its way back to the surface.

We had never left Dina on her own during an episode. Occasionally she somehow got sidetracked before she reached my place or Geri’s; she had come to us bruised, coked off her face, once with an inch-wide clump of hair pulled out by the roots. Every time, Geri and I tried to find out what had happened, but we never expected her to tell us.

I thought about ringing in sick. I almost did it; I had the phone in my hand, ready to dial the squad room and tell them I had picked up a nasty dose of gastric flu from my niece and someone else would have to take on this case till I could step away from the bathroom. It wasn’t the instant career nosedive that stopped me, regardless of what everyone I know would have thought. It was the picture of Pat and Jenny Spain, fighting to the death alone because they believed we had abandoned them. I couldn’t find a way to live with making that the truth.

At a few minutes to four I went into my bedroom, switched my mobile to silent and watched the screen till it lit up with Richie’s name. More nothing; he was starting to sound sleepy. I said, “If there’s no action by five, you can start winding it up. Tell Whatshisname and the other floaters to go get some kip and report back in at noon. You can manage another few hours with no sleep, am I right?”

“No bothers. I’ve got some caffeine tabs left.” There was a moment’s pause while he looked for the right way to word it. “Will I see you at the hospital, yeah? Or…?”

“Yes, old son, you will. Six sharp. Have Whatshisname drop you off on his way home. And make sure you get some breakfast into you, because once we get moving, we’re not going to be stopping for tea and toast. See you soon.”

I showered, shaved, found clean clothes and had a quick bowl of muesli, as quietly as I could. Then I wrote Dina a note: Good morning, dormouse-had to go to work but I’ll be back ASAP. Meanwhile, eat anything you can find in the kitchen, read/watch/listen to anything you can find on the shelves, have another shower-the place is all yours. Ring me/Geri any time if you have any hassle or if you just feel like a chat. M.

I left it on the coffee table, on top of a fresh towel and another granola bar. No keys: I had spent a long time thinking about that, but in the end it came down to a choice between the risk that the apartment would catch fire while she was locked in there and the risk that she would go wandering down some dodgy street and run into the wrong person. It was a bad week to have to trust in either luck or humanity, but if I’m backed into that corner, I’ll go with luck every time.

Dina twisted on the sofa, and for a moment I froze, but she only sighed and nuzzled her head deeper into the cushions. One slim arm hung outside the duvet, pale as milk, printed with neat, faint half circles of red tooth marks. I eased the duvet up to cover it. Then I pulled on my overcoat, slipped out of the apartment and closed the door behind me.