Authors: Tana French
10
W
e stuck to the uninhabited streets, Richie and me with our hands tucked through our man’s elbows, like we were helping our buddy home after a long night’s bad drinking. None of us said a word—most people would have at least a few questions if you slapped cuffs on them and hauled them off to a cop car, but not this guy. Slowly the sound of the sea subsided and left room for the rest of the night, bats shrilling, wind tugging at forgotten scraps of canvas; for a while teenagers’ jagged shouts reached us, thin and faraway, bounced back and forth off concrete and brick. Once I heard a harsh swallow that made me think our man might be crying, but I didn’t turn my head to look. He had called enough shots.
We put him in the back of the car, and Richie leaned on the bonnet while I moved out of earshot to make phone calls: sending the patrol floaters to hunt for a car parked somewhere not far from the estate, telling the bait floater she could go home, letting the night admin know we would need an interview room ready. Then we drove back to Dublin in silence. The haunted blackness of the estate, scaffolding bones looming up out of nowhere, stark against the stars; then the smooth speed of the motorway, cat’s-eyes flicking in and out of existence and the moon keeping pace off to one side, huge and watchful; then, gradually, the colors and movement of town building up around us, drunks and fast-food joints, the world coming back to life outside our sealed windows.
The squad room was quiet, just the two guys on call looking up from their coffees as we passed the door, to see who had been out night-hunting and was bringing something home. We put our man in the interview room. Richie undid the cuffs and I talked the guy through the rights sheet, in a bored drone like this was just meaningless paperwork. The word “solicitor” got a violent shake of his head; when I put the pen in his hand, he signed without a single question. The signature was a jerky squiggle that gave away nothing but an initial C. I picked up the sheet and left.
We watched him from the observation room, through the one-way glass. It was the first time I had had a proper look at him. Short-cropped brown hair, high cheekbones, a jutting chin with a couple of days’ worth of reddish stubble; he was wearing a black duffle coat that had seen plenty of use, a heavy roll-neck gray jumper and faded jeans, all dressed up for a night’s stalking. He had on hiking boots: the runners were gone. He was older than I had thought, and taller—late twenties, and not far off six foot—but he was so thin that he looked like the last stages of a hunger strike. It was the thinness that had minimized him into something younger, smaller, harmless. That illusion could have got him in the Spains’ door.
No cuts or bruises that I could see, but anything could be hidden under all those clothes. I turned the interview-room thermostat up higher.
It felt good, seeing him in that room. Most of our interview rooms could do with a shower, a shave and a full makeover, but I love every inch of them. Our territory fights on our side. In Broken Harbor he had been a shadow that moved through walls, an iodine scent of blood and seawater, with shards of moonlight stuck in his eyes. Now he was just a guy. They all are, once you get them between those four walls.
He sat hunched rigidly in the uncomfortable chair, staring down at his fists on the table like he was bracing himself for torture. He hadn’t even glanced around the room—linoleum pocked with old cigarette burns and lumps of chewing gum, walls scored with graffiti, bolted-down table and filing cabinet, the video camera’s dull red light watching him from a high corner—to get his bearings. I said, “What do we know about him?”
Richie was watching so intently that his nose was practically touching the glass. “He’s not on anything. At first I was thinking he could be on the gear, ’cause he’s so skinny, but no.”
“Not right now, anyway. That’s good for us: if we get anything, we don’t want him saying it was the drugs talking. What else?”
“Loner. Nocturnal.”
“Right. Everything says he’s more comfortable keeping his distance from other people, rather than making close contact—he got his kicks by watching, broke in when the Spains were out rather than when they were asleep. So when it comes time to push him, we want to get in close, get in his face, both of us at once. And since he’s nocturnal, we want the push to come towards dawn, when he’s starting to fade. Anything else?”
“No wedding ring. More than likely he lives alone: no one to notice when he’s out all night, ask him what he’s at.”
“Which would have its upside and its downside, as far as we’re concerned. No flatmate to testify that he got in at six on Tuesday morning and ran the washing machine for four hours straight, but on the other hand, no one for him to bother hiding things from. When we find his gaff, there’s a chance he’ll have left us a little present—the bloodstained clothes, that honeymoon pen. Maybe a trophy he took the other night.”
The guy stirred, groped at his face, rubbed clumsily at his mouth. His lips were swollen and cracked, like he had gone a long time without water.
Richie said, “He’s not working a nine-to-five. He could be unemployed, or self-employed, or maybe he does shift work or a part-time gig—something that means he can spend the night up in that nest when he wants to, without banjaxing himself for work the next day. Just going by the clothes, I’d say middle-class.”
“So would I. And he’s never been in the system before—his prints came up clean, remember. He probably doesn’t even know anyone who’s ever been in the system. He’s got to be disoriented and scared. That’s good stuff, but we want to save it for when we need it. We want to get him as relaxed as we can, see how far that takes us, then scare the living shite out of him when it comes to the big push. The good thing is, he won’t walk out on us before then. Middle-class guy, probably got respect for authority, doesn’t know the system . . . He’ll stay till we kick him out.”
“Yeah. Probably he will.” Richie was drawing absent, abstract patterns in the mist his breath had left on the glass. “And that’s all I can figure out about him. You know that? This fella’s organized enough to set up that nest, disorganized enough that he doesn’t even bother taking it down again. Clever enough to get himself into that house, thick enough to take the weapons away with him. He’s got enough self-control that he waited for months, but he can’t even wait two nights after the murder before he’s back up to his hide—and he must’ve known we’d be on the lookout, must’ve done. I can’t get a handle on him.”
On top of all that, the guy looked much too frail to have done this. I wasn’t fooled. Plenty of the most brutal predators I’ve caught looked soft as kittens, and they’re always at their tamest just after the kill, spent and sated. I said, “He’s got no more self-control than a baboon. None of them do. We’ve all wanted to kill someone, at some point in our lives—don’t tell me you haven’t. What makes these guys different from us is that they don’t stop themselves from actually doing it. Scratch the surface and they’re animals: screaming, shit-flinging, throat-ripping animals. That’s what we deal with. Never forget that.”
Richie didn’t look convinced. I said, “You think I’m being hard on them? Society’s given them a raw deal, and I should have a little more empathy?”
“Not exactly. Just . . . if he’s got no control, then how’d he manage to hold back for so long?”
I said, “He didn’t. We’re missing something.”
“How d’you mean?”
“Like you said, this guy spent at least a few months, probably more, just watching the Spains, maybe occasionally sneaking into the house when they weren’t around. That wasn’t his amazing self-control in action: it was because that was all he needed to get his fix. And then, all of a sudden, he comes
charging
out of his comfort zone: jumps from binoculars straight to full-on close contact. That didn’t come out of nowhere. Something happened, in this last week or so; something big. We’ll need to find out what that was.”
In the interview room, our man knuckled his eyes, stared at his hands like he was looking for blood, or tears. “And I’ll tell you one more thing,” I said. “He feels very emotionally connected to the Spains.”
Richie stopped drawing. “You think? I was thinking it wasn’t personal. The way he kept his distance . . .”
“No. If he were a professional, he’d be home by now: he’d have clocked that he’s not under arrest, and he’d never even have got into our car. And he isn’t a sociopath who saw them as just random objects that looked like fun, either. The soft kill on the kids, the close-contact kill on the adults, wrecking Jenny’s face . . . He had feelings for them. He thinks he was close to them. More than likely the only actual interaction they ever had was when Jenny smiled at him in the queue at Tesco; but in his head, at least, there was a connection there.”
Richie breathed on the glass again and went back to his patterns, more slowly this time. “You’re taking it as a definite that he’s our man,” he said. “Yeah?”
I said, “It’s early days to call anything definite.” There was no way to tell him that the drumming in my ears had swelled so high, in the car with this man at my shoulder, I had almost been afraid I would have us off the road. The man permeated the air around him with wrongness, strong and repellent as naphtha, as if he had been soaked in it. “But if you’re asking for my personal opinion, then yes. Hell yes. This is our man.”
The guy raised his head as if he had heard me, and his eyes, rimmed with painful-looking swells of red, skidded around the room. For a second they rested on the one-way glass. Maybe he watched enough cop shows to know what it was; maybe the thing that had fluttered through my skull in the car moved both ways, shrilled like a bat at the back of his neck to warn him I was there. For the first time, his eyes focused, like they were staring straight into mine. He took a quick deep breath and set his jaw, ready.
The tips of my fingers were prickling with how much I wanted to get in there. “We’ll let him wonder for another fifteen minutes,” I said. “Then you go in.”
“Just me?”
“He’ll see you as less of a threat than me. Nearer his age.” And there was the class gap, too: a nice middle-class boy could easily discount an inner-city kid like Richie as some idiot skanger. The lads would have been gobsmacked if they had seen me letting a brand-new newbie loose on this interrogation, but Richie wasn’t quite your ordinary rookie, and this felt like a two-man job. “Just settle him, Richie. That’s all. Find out his name, if you can. Get him a cup of tea. Don’t go anywhere near the case, and for the love of all that’s holy don’t let him ask for a lawyer. I’ll give you a few minutes with him, and then I’ll come in. OK?”
Richie nodded. He said, “You think we’ll get a confession out of him?”
Most of them never confess. You can show them their prints all over the weapon, the victim’s blood all over their clothes and CCTV footage of them whacking her over the head, and they’ll still be spewing out injured innocence and howling about frame-ups. In nine people out of ten, self-preservation goes deeper than sense, deeper than thought. You pray to get the tenth person, the one built with a crack in the self-preservation where something else runs deeper still—the need to be understood, the need to please you, sometimes even conscience. You pray for the one who, somewhere darker than the inside of bone, doesn’t want to save himself; for the one who stands at the top of the cliff and has to fight the urge to leap. Then you find that crack, and you press.
I said, “That’s what we’re aiming for. The Super comes in at nine; that gives us six hours. Let’s have this ready to hand over to him, all wrapped up and tied with a bow.”
Richie nodded again. He pulled off his jacket and three heavy jumpers and dropped them on a chair, leaving him narrow and gangly as a teenager in a long-sleeved navy T-shirt that had been washed thin. He stood at the glass, no fidgeting, and watched the guy hunch lower over the table until I checked my watch and said, “Go.” Then he ran a hand through his hair so it stood up on end, got two cups of water from the cooler, and went.
He did it nicely. He went in holding out a cup and saying, “Sorry, man, I meant to bring this in to you before, only I got caught up . . . Is that all right for you? Would you have a cup of tea instead, yeah?” His accent had got thicker. The class thing had occurred to him, too.
Our man had jumped half out of his skin when the door opened, and he was still catching his breath. He shook his head.
Richie hovered, looking fifteen. “You sure? Coffee?”
Another head-shake.
“Grand. You’ll let me know if you need more of this, yeah?”
The guy nodded and reached for the water. The chair rocked under his weight. “Ah, hang on,” Richie said. “He’s after giving you the dud chair.” Quick surreptitious glance at the door, like I might be behind it. “Go on: swap over. Have this one.”
Our man shuffled awkwardly across. Probably it made no difference—all the chairs in the interview rooms are chosen to be uncomfortable—but he said, so low I barely heard him, “Thanks.”
“No problem. Detective Richie Curran.” He held out a hand.
Our man didn’t take it. He said, “Do I have to tell you my name?” His voice was low and even, good to listen to, with a slight rough edge like it hadn’t got much use lately. The accent gave me nothing; he could have been from anywhere.
Richie looked surprised. “Do you not want to? Why not?”
After a moment he said, to himself, “. . . make any difference . . .” To Richie, with a mechanical handshake: “Conor.”
“Conor what?”
A fraction of a second. “Doyle.” It wasn’t, but that didn’t matter. Come morning we would find either his house or his car, or both, and strip them to the bones looking for, among other things, his ID. All we needed for now was something to call him.
“Nice to meet you, Mr. Doyle. Detective Kennedy’ll be here in a while, then yous can get started.” Richie balanced the edge of his arse on a corner of the table. “I’ll tell you now, I’m only delighted you showed up. I was dying to get out of there, I was. I know people pay good money to go camping up by the sea and all, but the countryside isn’t my style, know what I mean?”