Authors: Tana French
Rory’s going all pink and flustered again. I love blushers. ‘No, I do, yeah. Just, I was thinking – I mean, if we had wine with dinner, and if I needed to get home—’
‘You do? What kind of car?’
‘It’s a Toyota Yaris—’
Breslin snorted. ‘Yeah? What year?’
‘2007.’
‘Jesus,’ Breslin says, grinning into his notebook. ‘Now I see why you took the bus. Carry on.’
Rory ducks his head and pokes his glasses up his nose. Apparently he’s the type who takes wedgies meekly. When those guys finally snap, they do it right. I ask, ‘What time did you leave home?’
Rory instantly sits up straighter. He’s so glad to hear me doing the talking instead of Breslin, he’d tell me anything. ‘Quarter to seven.’
Which is the most interesting thing he’s said so far. His appointment with Aislinn was for eight. It doesn’t take an hour and a quarter to get from Ranelagh to Stoneybatter, specially not on a Saturday evening. He could have walked in half the time.
‘And when did you get the bus?’ I ask.
‘Just before seven. One got there as soon as I reached the stop.’
We can check that: CCTV on the bus. I write it down. ‘What time were you due at Aislinn’s place?’
‘Eight, but I – I mean, I didn’t want to be late. If I was early, I could always just walk around for a while.’
‘Brrr,’ I say, making a face. ‘In that weather? Doing what?’
Rory shifts his feet like he can’t get them comfortable. Talking about that extra time is turning him jumpy. I would only love to stamp Rory innocent and chase off after Steve’s gangster, but I can smell it, hot as blood: there’s something here.
He says, ‘I don’t know. Just . . . making sure I could find the house, that kind of thing.’
I look puzzled. ‘But you said her place was practically around the corner from the bus stop. That sounds like you already knew your way around.’
Rory’s blinking hard. ‘What? . . . No – no, not like that. But Aislinn had given me directions. And I’d looked up the map on my phone. It wasn’t complicated. I just wanted to allow a little extra time, just in case.’
I leave a sceptical pause, but he doesn’t jump into it. ‘OK,’ I say. ‘So you got off the 39A in Stoneybatter – what time?’
‘A little before half-seven. There wasn’t much traffic.’
In plenty of time to reach Aislinn’s house, kill her, and be back outside the door knocking and looking confused by eight o’clock. It even makes sense of turning off the cooker: Rory didn’t want the fire alarm going off before he had time to act out his little play with the calls and the texts and presumably the worried pacing, for anyone who might be watching. That hot smell fills up my nose.
I glance over at the one-way glass, which stares blankly back. One look at Steve would have told me if his mind was matching mine. Instead I have Breslin, who’s rocking his chair on its back legs and doodling in his notebook. I think about kicking the chair out from under him.
‘You were well early,’ I say. ‘What’d you do?’
Rory says, ‘I walked round to the top of Viking Gardens – that’s Aislinn’s road. To make sure I had the directions right. Like I said.’
‘See anyone on Viking Gardens?’
‘No. The street was empty. I didn’t hang around there, though. I didn’t want anyone thinking I was a burglar or a, a stalker.’ Another jab at his glasses.
‘Did you go into the road? Find Aislinn’s house?’
‘No. It’s a straight road, a cul-de-sac – I could see the whole thing from the top; I didn’t need to find the house in advance. And I wasn’t keen on the idea of Aislinn looking out her window and seeing me there half an hour early. She would have had to invite me in, and she wouldn’t have been ready, and overall it would have been really awkward.’
He’s edgy as hell, but the answers are coming easily, no stumbling or backtracking. That doesn’t mean much, though; not with this guy. He’s already told us he’s the type who thinks ahead, goes through every hypothetical, makes sure he’s got everything in place so his plans will run smoothly. If he planned a murder, he’d have his alibi story down pat; probably he’d do a walk-through a couple of days in advance. And if he didn’t plan it, he would be well able to spend the night coming up with a good story and running through it a few hundred times. This guy’s real comfort zone is inside his head.
‘Plus she would have thought you were some obsessive freak who spent his spare time staring at her windows,’ Breslin points out. Rory flinches. ‘That’s never a good look. What’d you do instead?’
‘I was going to just wander around till eight o’clock. But then I realised I hadn’t brought anything with me.’
‘What, you mean condoms?’ Breslin breaks into a big grin. ‘Now there’s self-confidence.’
Rory’s head shoots down and he starts jabbing at his glasses again. ‘No! I mean flowers. I didn’t want to show up empty-handed. Aislinn had said not to bother bringing wine, but I’d been planning to buy her flowers in Ranelagh, except I forgot – I was concentrating so hard on what to wear and getting it ironed right and what time to leave . . . I only realised when I got to her road.’
‘Awk-ward,’ Breslin says, singsong. He’s tilting his chair back again and playing with his pen.
‘Well, yes. For a second there I was panicking. But there’s a Tesco up on Prussia Street, so—’
‘Hang on,’ I say, confused. ‘I thought you didn’t know the area.’
‘I don’t. I— What?’
‘How’d you know where the Tesco is?’
Rory blinks at me. ‘I looked it up on my phone. So I headed up there—’
I know before Breslin opens his mouth that he’s gonna come in. We’re working well together: me keeping things chilled so we can get the basic info, him leaning in whenever he gets an opening to poke Rory with sticks, me standing under the piñata ready to catch whatever sweeties come tumbling out. I don’t like working well with Breslin. It feels like he’s suckering me all over again, in ways I can’t pin down.
‘Tesco flowers?’ he asks. His face is halfway between a grin and a cringe. ‘I thought you said this Aislinn’s the fancy type.’
Rory shifts his arse on the chair. ‘I did. She is. But at that hour—’
‘She’s the fancy type, she’s been slaving over a hot cooker all day for you, and you’re going to show up with a bunch of half-dead shocking-pink daisies? Come
on
.’
‘Well, no, it wasn’t what I’d planned. I wanted – Aislinn told me that when she was little her father used to take her to Powerscourt and they’d walk around the Japanese garden together, looking at the azaleas, and he’d tell her stories about a brave princess called Aislinn. So I wanted to see if I could find her an azalea plant. I thought . . .’ A tiny rueful smile, down at his hands. ‘I thought it would make her happy.’
‘That’s nice,’ I say, nodding. ‘Really nice. I’d say she’d have loved that.’
‘Now that,’ Breslin says approvingly, pointing his Biro at Rory, ‘that’s bringing your A game. That’s the kind of thing that gets a guy places, if you know what I mean. That might even have made up for those.’ The gloves. ‘Shame you screwed it up. I’m betting Tesco doesn’t stock azaleas.’
‘I know it doesn’t. But at that hour on a Saturday evening, nowhere else was going to be open. I thought even a bunch of ugly flowers was better than nothing.’ Rory glances anxiously between the two of us, looking for approval.
Breslin grimaces and wavers one hand. ‘Depends on the girl. If she’s the downmarket type, sure, but with this one . . . Never mind; too late now. So you headed up to Tesco . . . ?’
‘Yes. They didn’t have a lot of flowers left, and most of them were what you said – big daisies dyed strange colours – but I found a bunch of irises that were OK.’
‘Nothing wrong with irises,’ I say. ‘What time did you get to the Tesco?’
‘About quarter to eight. Maybe just after.’
And we can check that, too. CCTV on the bus, CCTV in the Tesco: the whole timeline Rory’s laying out is verifiable, and I wonder if that’s deliberate. Those forgotten flowers were very convenient. The Tesco is seven or eight minutes’ walk from Viking Gardens: just enough to account nice and neatly for that extra half-hour.
If Rory rushed there or back – and we need to go looking for someone who saw him rushing – he could have shaved a couple of minutes off that walk. The actual murder took almost no time: two seconds for the punch, maybe ten or twenty to check Aislinn’s breathing and her pulse, ten to turn off the cooker, gone inside a minute. It’s the build-up to the murder that could have taken time; if there was a build-up.
If Rory is our boy, he’s no routine rock-bottom-stupid wimp. He’s nervous, but he’s covering every crack before we can reach it, one step ahead all the way. If we’re stuck with him, then at least we’re gonna get a fight.
‘Cutting it a bit fine,’ I say. ‘How long were you there?’
‘Only a couple of minutes. I hurried. Like you said, I didn’t have a lot of time left. Things like this are why I like being early.’
‘Fair enough,’ I say. ‘So when you left Tesco . . . ?’
‘I went back to Viking Gardens. I got there in time – I checked my watch: it was just before eight.’
‘Was there anyone on the road?’
Rory thinks, rubbing at his nose. ‘There was an old man walking his dog – a smallish white dog. He was heading out of Viking Gardens. He nodded to me. I don’t think there was anyone else.’
Easy to check, again. ‘So then what?’
‘I went down the road looking at the house numbers till I found Aislinn’s house – it’s number twenty-six. I rang the bell . . .’
He trails off. I say, ‘And?’
‘She didn’t answer the door.’
This time the blush comes up hot and fast. I can feel Steve behind the glass swaying towards that blush, positive that it means he was right and Rory Fallon is a holy innocent. I’m not so sure. That blush could be the memory of humiliation, or it could be the lie showing.
‘Huh,’ I say. ‘Weird. What did you think was going on?’
Rory’s head is going down. ‘At that stage I just thought Aislinn hadn’t heard me. I knew the bell was working – I could hear it going off inside the house – but I thought maybe she was in the toilet, or she’d gone out the back for some reason.’
‘So what’d you do?’
‘I waited a minute and then knocked. Then I rang the bell again. She still didn’t answer, so after a few more minutes I texted her – I was wondering if I had the address wrong. I waited for ages, but she didn’t text me back.’
‘Ooo,’ Breslin says, wincing. ‘That’s gotta sting.’
‘I thought maybe she hadn’t heard the text alert—’ Rory catches the mix of pity and amusement on Breslin’s face and ducks his head back down. ‘It could happen. She could have been cooking or something, and left her phone in another room – those text alerts can be awfully quiet—’
‘I’m always missing mine,’ I agree. ‘Pain in the hole. So did you try her again?’
‘I rang her. The house is only a little cottage, one storey, so I thought she’d definitely hear the ring, no matter where she was. But she didn’t answer.’ Rory glances up, catches Breslin’s dry grin and winces. ‘I tried one more time – this time I put my ear to the door, to see if I could hear the phone ringing inside – I was wondering if she was even there, or if . . . But I couldn’t hear anything.’
We’ll check that. I say, ‘What did you figure the story was?’
‘I wasn’t sure. I thought probably . . .’ Rory’s voice has almost vanished.
‘Speak up,’ Breslin says. ‘The camera needs to hear this.’
Rory manages a little more volume, but he’s still having trouble looking at us. ‘Well. Aislinn cancelled a date at the last minute, a couple of weeks ago. She never said why; just that something had come up. And it was pretty complicated trying to schedule our other dates, as well – I’d suggest a day and it wouldn’t work for her, or it would at first and then there was a problem – and sometimes she doesn’t answer her phone . . . I don’t know whether it’s some mind-game – that really, really doesn’t seem like something Aislinn would do, but obviously I don’t know her that well yet – or whether there’s something in her life that she’s not ready to tell me about, like a parent with dementia or alcoholism who sometimes needs looking after at short notice?’ No mention of two-timing, although the possibility has to have occurred to him. Maybe he’s just dodging the slagging from Breslin, but it’s an interesting one to leave out. ‘So I thought this was probably more of the same. Whatever that was.’
‘And you standing there with your lovely Tesco irises,’ Breslin says, almost keeping back a smirk. ‘All ready for action.’ Rory’s head goes down farther.
I say, nice and sympathetic, ‘Were you worried? That something had happened to Aislinn?’
Rory turns towards me gratefully. ‘Yes. I was, a bit. That’s why I asked, when you came in, whether this was about her. I was afraid she might have fainted, or slipped in the shower, or she might be too sick even to pick up her phone – I mean, that might have been the thing she wasn’t ready to tell me about: some illness, epilepsy or . . . But I didn’t know what to do about it. I couldn’t ring 999 and tell them the emergency was that a woman wasn’t answering her door to a guy she’d only known a few weeks – they’d have laughed in my face and told me it sounded like I needed a new girlfriend. Even I knew that was the most likely scenario. But I couldn’t help imagining all the possibilities – I do that, even when it’s not . . . Is Aislinn OK?’