Authors: Tana French
I said, “I wouldn’t come to an arrangement with you if you had a bomb strapped to my chest.”
That pushed Quigley back a step, out of my face, but he wasn’t going to give up that easily. His prize was so close he was practically drooling. “Don’t be saying anything you’ll regret, Detective Kennedy. No one needs to know where this was last night. You can sort your bit of fluff; she won’t say a word. Neither will Curran, if he’s got any sense in his head. This can go straight to the evidence room, like nothing ever happened.” He shook the bag; I heard the dry rattle of the fingernail on paper. “It’ll be our wee secret. You have a think about that, before you go disrespecting me.”
“There’s nothing to think about.”
After a moment, Quigley leaned back against the railing. “I’ll tell you something for nothing, Kennedy,” he said. His tone had changed; all the creamy fake-buddy coating had fallen away. “I knew you were going to fuck this case up. The second you came back from seeing the Super, Tuesday, I knew. You always thought you were something special, didn’t you? Mr. Perfect, never put a toe out of line. And look at you now.” That smirk again, this time halfway to a snarl, alive with malice that he wasn’t bothering to hide any more. “I’d only love to know: what was it made you cross the line on this one? Was it just that you’ve been a saint so long, you figured you could get away with anything you like, no one would ever suspect the great Scorcher Kennedy?”
Not paperwork after all, not the chance to borrow one of my floaters. Quigley had come in to work on a Saturday morning because God forbid he should miss the moment when I went arse over tip. I said, “I wanted to make your day, old son. Looks like I succeeded.”
“You always took me for a fool. Let’s all take the piss out of Quigley, the great thick eejit, sure he won’t even notice. Go on and tell me: if you’re the hero and I’m the fool, then how come you’re the one that’s deep in the shit, and I’m the one that saw it coming all along?”
He was wrong. I had never underestimated him. I had always known about Quigley’s one skill: his hyena nose, the instinct that pulls him snuffling and salivating towards shaky suspects, frightened witnesses, wobbly-legged newbies, anything that flashes soft spots or smells of blood. Where I had gone wrong was in believing that didn’t mean me. All those years of endless excruciating therapy sessions, of staying vigilant over every move and word and thought; I had been sure I was mended, all the breaks healed, all the blood washed away. I knew I had earned my way to safety. I had believed, beyond any doubt, that that meant I was safe.
The moment I said
Broken Harbor
to O’Kelly, every faded scar in my mind had lit up like a beacon. I had walked the glittering lines of those scars, obedient as a farm animal, from that moment straight to this one. I had moved through this case shining like Conor Brennan had shone on that dark road, a blazing signal for predators and scavengers far and wide.
I said, “You’re not a fool, Quigley. You’re a disgrace. I could fuck up every hour on the hour, from now till I retire, and still be a better cop than you’ll ever be. I’m ashamed to be on the same squad as you.”
“You’re in luck, then, aren’t you? You might not have to put up with me much longer. Not once the Super sees this.”
I said, “I’ll take it from here.”
I held out a hand for the bag, but Quigley whipped it out of reach. He prissed up his mouth and deliberated, swinging the bag between finger and thumb. “I’m not sure I can give you this, now. How do I know where it’ll end up?”
When I got my breath back, I said, “You make me sick.”
Quigley’s face curdled, but he saw something in mine that shut him up. He dropped the bag into my hand like it was filthy. “I’ll be submitting a full report,” he informed me. “As soon as possible.”
I said, “You do that. Just stay out of my way.” I shoved the evidence bag into my pocket and left him there.
* * *
I went up to the top floor, shut myself in a cubicle in the gents’ and leaned my forehead against the clammy plastic of the door. My mind had turned slippery and treacherous as black ice, I couldn’t get purchase; every thought seemed to send me lurching through into freezing water, grabbing for solid ground and finding nothing. When my hands finally stopped shaking, I opened the door and went downstairs to the incident room.
It was overheated and buzzing, floaters taking calls, updating the whiteboard, drinking coffee and laughing at a dirty joke and having some kind of debate about blood-spatter patterns. All the energy made me dizzy. I picked my way through it feeling like my legs might go at any second.
Richie was at his desk, shirtsleeves rolled up, messing around with report sheets and not seeing them. I threw my sodden coat over the back of my chair, leaned over to him and said quietly, “We’re going to collect a few pieces of paper each and leave the room, like we’re in a hurry, but without making a big deal of it. Let’s go.”
He stared for a second. His eyes were bloodshot; he looked like shit. Then he nodded, picked up a handful of reports and pushed back his chair.
There’s an interview room, down at the far end of the top-floor corridor, that we never use unless we have to. The heating doesn’t work—even in the heart of summer the room feels chilled, subterranean—and something wrong with the wiring means that the strip lights give off a raw, eye-splitting blaze and burn out every week or two. We went there.
Richie closed the door behind us. He stayed beside it, sheaf of pointless paper hanging forgotten from one hand, eyes skittery as a corner boy’s. That was what he looked like: some malnourished scumbag hunched against a graffitied wall, standing lookout for small-time dealers in exchange for a fix. I had been beginning to think of this man as my partner. His skinny shoulder braced against mine had begun to feel like something that belonged. The feeling had been a good one, a warm one. Both of us made me sick.
I took the evidence bag out of my pocket and put it down on the table.
Richie bit down on both his lips, but he didn’t flinch or startle. The last scatter of hope blew out of me. He had been expecting this.
The silence went on forever. Probably Richie thought I was using it to bear down on him, the way I would have with a suspect. I felt as if the air of the room had turned crystalline, brittle, and when I spoke it would shatter into a million razor-edged shards and rain down on our heads, slice us both to rags.
Finally I said, “A woman handed it in this morning. The description matches my sister.”
That hit Richie. His head snapped up and he stared at me, sick-faced and forgetting to breathe. I said, “I’d like to know how the fuck she got her hands on this.”
“Your
sister
?”
“The woman you saw waiting for me outside here, on Tuesday night.”
“I didn’t know she was your sister. You never said.”
“And I didn’t know it was any of your business. How did she get hold of this?”
Richie slumped back against the door and ran a hand across his mouth. “She showed up at my gaff,” he said, without looking at me. “Last night.”
“How did she know where you live?”
“I don’t know. I walked home, yesterday—I needed a chance to think.” A glance—a quick one, like it hurt—at the table. “I figure she must’ve been waiting outside here again, either for me or for you. She must’ve seen me come out, followed me home. I was only in the door five minutes when I heard the bell.”
“And you invited her in for a cup of tea and a nice chat? Is that what you normally do when strange women show up at your door?”
“She asked could she come in. She was freezing; I could see her shivering. And she wasn’t some randomer. I remembered her, from Tuesday night.” Of course he had. Men, in particular, don’t forget Dina in a hurry. “I wasn’t going to let a mate of yours freeze on my doorstep.”
“You’re a real saint. It didn’t occur to you to, I don’t know,
ring me
and tell me she was there?”
“It
did
occur to me. I was going to. But she was . . . she wasn’t in great shape, man. She was holding on to my arm and going, over and over, ‘Don’t tell Mikey I’m here, don’t you dare tell Mikey, he’ll freak out . . .’ I would’ve done it anyway, only she didn’t give me a chance. Even when I went to the jacks, she made me leave my phone with her—and my flatmates were down the pub, it wasn’t like I could drop them a hint or get her talking to one of them while I texted you. In the end I thought, no harm done, she’s somewhere safe for the night, you and me could talk in the morning.”
“‘No harm done,’” I said. “Is that what you call this?”
A short, twisting silence. I said, “What did she want?”
Richie said, “She was worried about you.”
I laughed loud enough to startle both of us. “Oh, she was, was she? That’s a fucking riot. I think you know Dina well enough at this stage to have spotted that, if anyone needs worrying about, it’s
her
. You’re a detective, chum. That means you’re supposed to notice the bleeding obvious. My sister is as mad as a hatter. She’s five beers short of a six-pack. She’s up the wall and swinging from the chandelier. Please don’t tell me you missed that.”
“She didn’t seem crazy to me. Upset, yeah, up to ninety, but that was because she was worried about you. Properly worried, like. Freaking-out worried.”
“That’s exactly what I’m talking about. That
is
crazy. Worried about
what
?”
“This case. What it was doing to you. She said—”
“The only thing Dina knows about this case is that it
exists
. That’s it. And even that was enough to send her off the fucking deep end.” I never tell anyone that Dina is crazy. People have raised the possibility to me before, on occasion; none of them made that mistake twice. “Do you want to know how I spent Tuesday night? Listening to her rave about how she couldn’t sleep in her flat because her shower curtain was ticking like a grandfather clock. Want to know how I spent Wednesday evening? Trying to convince her not to set fire to the heap of paper that she had left of my books.”
Richie shifted, uneasily, against the door. “I don’t know about any of that. She wasn’t like that at my place.”
Something in my stomach clamped tight. “Of course she bloody well wasn’t. She knew you’d be on the phone to me in a heartbeat, and that didn’t suit her plans. She’s crazy, not stupid. And she’s got some serious willpower, when she feels like it.”
“She said she’d been over at yours the last few nights, talking to you, and the case had your head melted. She . . .” He glanced at me. He was picking his words carefully. “She said you weren’t OK. She said you’d always been good to her, never once been anything but gentle, even when she didn’t deserve it—that’s what she said—but the other night she startled you, when she showed up, and you pulled your gun. She said she left because you told her she should kill herself.”
“And you believed that.”
“I figured she was exaggerating. But still . . . She wasn’t making it up about you being stressed, man. She said you were coming apart, this case was taking you apart, and there was no way you’d put it down.”
I couldn’t tell, through all this dark snarled mess, whether this was Dina’s revenge for something real or imaginary that I had done to her, or whether she had seen something I had missed, something that had sent her banging on Richie’s door like a panicked bird beating against a window. I couldn’t tell, either, which one would be worse.
“She said to me, ‘You’re his partner, he trusts you. You have to look after him. He won’t let me, he won’t let his family, maybe he might let you.’”
I said, “Did you sleep with her?”
I had been trying not to ask. The fraction of silence, after Richie opened his mouth, told me everything I needed to know. I said, “Don’t bother answering that.”
“Listen, man, listen—you never said she was your sister. Neither did she. I swear to God, if I’d’ve known—”
I had come within a hairsbreadth of telling him. I had held back because, God help me, I thought it would make me vulnerable. “What did you think she was? My girlfriend? My ex? My daughter? How exactly would any of those have made it better?”
“She said she was an old mate of yours. She said she knew you from back when you were kids—your family and her family used to get caravans together at Broken Harbor, for the summer. That’s what she told me. Why would I think she was lying?”
“How about because she’s fucking nutso? She comes in babbling about a case she hasn’t got a clue about, drowning you in bullshit about me having a nervous breakdown. Ninety percent of what she says is gibberish. It doesn’t even occur to you that the other ten percent might not be on the level?”
“It wasn’t gibberish, but. She was dead right: this case, it’s been getting to you. I thought that from the start, almost.”
Every breath hurt on its way in. “That’s sweet. I’m touched. So you felt the appropriate response was to fuck my sister.”
Richie looked like he would happily saw his own arm off if it would make this conversation go away. “It wasn’t like that.”
“How in the name of sweet jumping Jesus was it
not like that
? Did she drug you? Handcuff you to the bedpost?”
“I didn’t go in there planning to . . . I don’t think she did either.”
“Are you seriously trying to tell me how my sister thinks? After one night?”
“
No.
I’m just saying—”
“Because I know her a lot better than you do, chum, and even I struggle for any clue about what goes on in her head. I think it’s more than possible that she went to your house planning on doing exactly what she did. I’m one hundred percent positive that this was her idea, not yours. That doesn’t mean you had to play along. What the holy hell were you thinking?”
“Honest to God, it was just one thing led to another. She was scared this case would mess you up, she was going in circles around my sitting room, crying—she couldn’t sit down, she was that upset. I gave her a hug, just to settle her—”
“And that’s where you shut up. I don’t need the graphic details.” I didn’t; I could see exactly how it had gone down. It’s so, so lethally easy to get dragged into Dina’s crazy. One minute you’re only going to dip your toes at the edge, just so you can grab her hand and pull her out; the next minute you’re full fathom five and flailing for air.