Authors: Tana French
Lucy’s voice fractures. She dives her head down and digs at another smear of paint, so viciously that she’s got to be gouging into her leg through the combats. Whatever game she’s playing with us, it’s used her up.
She says, down to her knees, ‘How did . . . ? Whoever did this. What did he do to her?’
I say, ‘We can’t give out details, for operational reasons. As far as we can tell, she didn’t suffer.’
Lucy opens her mouth to say something else, but she can’t make it work. Tears fall onto her combats and spread into dark stains.
The decent thing to do is leave, give her privacy while the first wave of grief smashes her down and pounds her black and blue. Neither of us moves. She holds out for almost a minute before she starts sobbing.
We give her tissues and refill her water glass, ask if she’s got someone who could come stay with her, nod sympathetically and stay put when she manages to say she just wants to be by herself. When she can talk again, we get her to make us a list of Aislinn’s exes – all three of them, including a two-week summer fling called Jorge when she was seventeen; the girl was a real player – and of everyone she remembers being at the book launch. We ask – just a formality, ticking the boxes, have to ask everyone – where Lucy was yesterday evening. She was at the Torch: arrived at the theatre at half-six, did various stuff within sight of other people till the show came down just after ten, went for a few in the pub, then came home around one in the morning with the lighting operator and two of the cast, who hung out doing the obvious until around four. We – meaning the floaters – will check her story, but we won’t find holes in it.
I’m about to bring up the formal ID when Steve says, ‘Here are our cards,’ and shoots a glance at me. I find a card and shut up. ‘Whenever you feel like you’re ready to make your official statement, you give one of us a ring.’
Lucy takes the cards without knowing they’re there. I say, ‘Meanwhile, please don’t talk to any journalists. Seriously. Even if you don’t think you’re saying anything important, it could do real damage to the investigation. OK?’ Creepy Crowley is still nagging at the back of my mind. If someone’s siccing him on me, it’s someone who’s gonna have access to Lucy’s details.
Lucy nods, wiping her eyes with the back of her hand – she used up the tissues a while back. It makes no difference; the tears are still coming.
She says – her voice has gone thick from crying – ‘Whoever did this . . . it’s like he killed a little kid: someone who never even had a chance to get her life started. He took away her whole entire life. Could you remember that? When you’re investigating?’
I say, ‘Don’t worry. We’re going to do everything we can to put this guy away.’
Lucy gives up and leaves the tears to drip off her chin. She looks like shite, eyes puffed half-shut, a smear of purple paint down one cheek. ‘Yeah, I know. Just . . . Could you just keep that in mind?’
‘OK,’ I say. ‘We’ll do that. In exchange, though, I want you to keep thinking about whether there’s anything else you can tell us. Anything at all. Yeah?’
Lucy nods, for whatever that’s worth. She’s not looking at either of us. We leave her staring at nothing, surrounded by the ashy leftovers of last night.
Daytime’s kicked in properly while we were up there. Rathmines is buzzing: students hunting hangover cures, couples making sure the world can see how in love they are, families who are going to enjoy their family time if it kills them all. One look at it drops us both into the morning-after vortex, when your body suddenly realises you’ve been up all night and shuts down the engine, turning you floppy with fatigue.
‘Coffee,’ Steve says. ‘Jesus, I need coffee.’
‘Wimp.’
‘Me? If you shut your eyes, you’ll fall over asleep. Do it. I dare you.’
‘Fuck off.’
‘Coffee. And food.’
I hate wasting my time eating on the job, I can’t wait for them to come up with some nutrition pill I can pop twice a day, but till then me and Steve both need food and plenty of it. ‘Your turn to buy,’ I say. ‘Find somewhere they serve coffee by the litre.’
Steve does it right: skips the shiny hip chai-and-cronut cafés, picks the smallest, scuzziest corner shop, and comes out with massive medical-grade coffees and breakfast rolls stuffed with enough sausages and egg and rashers to see us through most of the day. We take them to a little park off a side street; it’s too cold for that, with a nasty edge to the air like it’s just waiting for the right moment to dump sleet down the backs of our necks, but getting out of the car means at least no one can give us hassle over the radio, and we need to have a conversation that doesn’t belong in a coffee shop.
The park looks just adorable, all curly wrought-iron benches and neatly clipped hedges and flowerbeds waiting for spring, till you look again: used condom twisted in the hedge, blue plastic bag hanging off a railing with something sticking out that I don’t like the look of. The place has a nightlife. In sunshine it would be jammed, but the weather is keeping people wary. On one bench a guy in a Tesco uniform is having a smoke, whipping his head around after each puff like he’s checking no one’s seen him, and a kid is circling grimly on a scooter while his mother bobs a whining buggy and swipes at her phone. The kid is wearing a hat that looks like some kind of dinosaur eating his head.
We find a bench that doesn’t smell like anyone’s pissed on it recently. I turn up my coat collar and get half my coffee down me in one swig. ‘You were right. Talking to Lucy, that was worth doing.’
‘I think so, yeah. It could still be Rory Fallon—’
I give Steve the eyeball. ‘It is. Almost definitely, it is.’
Steve wavers his head noncommittally. He’s unfolding paper napkins to spread over the front of his overcoat – these are attack sandwiches, and Steve takes his work clothes very seriously. ‘Maybe. But the rest of that stuff’s worth knowing, either way.’
I’m feeling better already; the coffee zapped my eyelids open like something out of a cartoon. ‘At least we know why Aislinn’s gaff looked like Working Girl Barbie Playhouse. And why Aislinn looked like Dream Date Barbie. The woman hadn’t got a clue; she was putting together who she was meant to be out of magazines.’
Steve says, ‘Someone like that, she’s vulnerable. Really vulnerable.’
‘No shit. Rory could be a full-on psychopath with more red flags than the Chinese embassy, and as long as he wore the right labels and helped her put her coat on, she’d still have invited him over for dinner on Date Three. Because that’s what you’re supposed to do.’
‘Lucy’s not clueless,’ Steve points out. ‘If he was covered in red flags, she’d’ve spotted them.’
‘Speaking of,’ I say. The breakfast roll is good stuff, proper thick rashers, grease and egg yolk going everywhere; I can feel my energy creeping back up. ‘What’d you think of Lucy?’
‘Smart. Scared.’ Steve has finished arranging his bib. He props his coffee cup on the bench and starts peeling back his sandwich wrapper. ‘She’s keeping something back.’
‘She’s keeping back plenty. And that doesn’t make sense. Forget all that hair-splitting crap about old-mates-not-best-mates-no-not-that-kind-of-mates; she cared about Aislinn, a lot. So what the hell? Does she not want the guy caught?’
‘You think she knows more about Aislinn’s married fella than she’s letting on?’
‘I think we’ve only got Lucy’s word for it that this married fella even exists.’ We’re keeping our voices down; Tesco guy and buggy mammy look like they’ve barely noticed we’re here, but you never know. ‘She was dead careful not to give us anything we could disprove, you notice that? No name, no description, no dates, no place where they might’ve met, nothing.’
Steve has his roll opened up across his lap and is carefully decorating it with brown sauce. ‘You figure she made him up on the spot? Why, but?’
I say, ‘She cares way too much whether Rory’s our prime suspect. It’s not just that she wants to know who did this to her mate; she wants to know whether we’re looking at Rory, specifically.’
‘Yeah.’ Steve squirts the last of the brown sauce into his mouth and tosses the packet into a bin by the bench. ‘I couldn’t figure out whether she was hoping it was yes or no, though. She was straight in there giving us Rory’s name, telling us he was due at Aislinn’s last night; but after that . . .’
‘Right. Giving us his name and the appointment was no big deal: she had to know we had that already, or would any minute. And after that, it was all about what a good guy he was, how she never got any kind of threat vibe off him, how happy Aislinn was with him. Could be all true; she could be trying to steer us away from him because she genuinely doesn’t think it’s him, doesn’t want us wasting our time while the real guy gets away. But I’m wondering if her feelings for Rory were as nonexistent as she’s claiming.’
Steve’s eyebrows go up. ‘“I thought he was kind of boring, but Ash was obviously seeing something I missed . . .” ’
‘Yeah, we’ve only got Lucy’s word for that, too. For all we know, she was just as into Rory as Aislinn was. For all we know, she was actually seeing him behind Aislinn’s back.’
‘We just said: she cared about Aislinn. A lot.’
‘And for some reason, she’s not happy admitting that. Could be guilt.’ I get more coffee into me. ‘Like she said herself, that love-triangle shite can go way wrong.’
‘She’s got an alibi,’ Steve points out.
‘Yeah, plus the shock was genuine. Lucy’s not our woman. But her alibi means she can’t give Rory an alibi. So if she wants him off the hook, for whatever reason, the only thing she can do is come up with some mysterious other guy for us to chase.’
Steve chews and thinks. ‘We’ll cross-check Lucy’s and Rory’s numbers, Facebook accounts, e-mails, see if they’ve been in touch. Not that it proves anything if they haven’t; Lucy could still be into him.’
‘Yeah.’ The dinosaur kid is hovering, balancing on his scooter and eyeing our rolls. I give him a hairy look till he backs off. ‘And we need to go through Aislinn’s stuff ASAP, see if we find any evidence that this other fella existed. If he did, there’s gonna be something. Texts, calls, e-mails.’
Steve examines his breakfast roll, picking an angle. ‘Well,’ he says. ‘Maybe.’
‘What’re you on about, “maybe”? There’s no such thing as invisible, not any more. If he didn’t leave tracks, it’s because he wasn’t there.’
‘Tell you what I was thinking,’ Steve says. ‘Just an idea, now. But I was wondering: what if Aislinn’s other fella was a crim? A gangster, like?’
Fried egg nearly goes down my nose. ‘Jesus, Moran. How desperate are you to make this one interesting? Shame they got Whitey Bulger, or you could’ve told yourself it was him.’
‘Yeah yeah yeah. Think about it. It explains why Lucy doesn’t want us going after Rory: she’s positive it’s the other guy, doesn’t want us heading the wrong way. It explains why she figured straightaway we were there about Aislinn. It explains why she texted her to be careful, last night: if Aislinn was two-timing a crim, she’d want to be bloody careful about inviting some new fella around for dinner—’
I still have my mouth open to slag strips off him when it sinks in: Little Mr Optimist is right. It would fit.
‘Jesus,’ I say. That pulse is hammering right through me, practically lifting me off the bench. Forget coffee; this job, when it’s right, this job is the hit that speed freaks throw their lives away hunting. ‘And it’d explain why Lucy’s keeping stuff back. She wants us to get him, but the last thing she wants is to be up on the stand with some gangster watching her explain how she’s the one who dobbed him in. So she throws the idea out there for us to chase down, but she makes a big deal about how she doesn’t know the other guy’s name, doesn’t know anything about him, can’t even swear he exists, her and Aislinn weren’t actually that close. Fair play to you, Steo. It works.’
‘Not just a pretty face,’ Steve says, through roll, giving me a thumbs-up. When he’s swallowed: ‘And if it was a gangster, he might’ve been careful not to leave a trail. No texts, calls, none of that.’
‘Specially if he was a married gangster. Half of them are married to each other’s sisters, cousins, whatever. Playing offside could get you kneecapped.’ I’ve got my second wind now, all right. If this pans out, the gaffer is gonna shit a hedgehog; this is about as far from routine as a lovers’ tiff can get. ‘Jesus. It actually plays.’
‘It’d explain why the call came in to Stoneybatter station, too. Most civilians, if they want an ambulance, they’ll just ring 999—’
‘But a crim, or a crim’s mate, he’s gonna know that 999 calls are recorded. And he’s not gonna want his voice on tape, where we can identify it – specially if he’s already known to us. So he rings the local station instead.’
‘Exactly,’ Steve says. ‘The only thing, though. Does Aislinn seem to you like the type who’d go out with a gangster? Nice girl like that?’
‘Hell, yeah. She’s
exactly
the type. Her life was so boring, just thinking about it makes me want to hit myself in the face with a hammer for a bit of excitement. You know what she had in her bookcase? Bunch of books about crime in Ireland, including a big thick one on gangs.’
Steve lets out a huff of laughter. ‘Look at that. Maybe she was the type after all.’
‘I thought she was just looking for second-hand thrills, but she could’ve been reading up on her new fella’s job – or maybe the book was just for kicks, but then she got a chance at the real thing. And you heard Lucy: it’s not like Aislinn had some big moral sense, or even basic common sense, that’d stop her getting involved with a crim.’ I’m working to keep my voice even. It’s early days; this is a stack of made-up ifs and maybes that could dissolve into nothing any second. ‘If some dodgy geezer starts chatting her up in a club? As long as he’s good-looking and he dresses OK, she’s gonna be fucking
thrilled
. It’s gonna make her
year
.’