Authors: Tana French
One of the reasons I don’t trust O’Kelly is because of his office. It’s full of naff crap – a framed crayon drawing that says world’s best granddad, pissant local golf trophies, a shiny executive toy in case he gets the urge to make clicky noises with swingy balls – and stacks of dusty files that never move. The whole room says he’s some outdated time-server who spends the day practising his golf swing and polishing his nameplate and working out fussy ways to tell if someone’s touched his stash bottle of single malt. If O’Kelly was that, he wouldn’t have been running Murder for coming up on twenty years. The office has to be window dressing, to put people off their guard. And the only people who see it are the squad.
O’Kelly is leaning back in his fancy ergonomic chair, with his arms draped on its arms, like some banana-republic dictator granting an audience. ‘Conway. Moran,’ he says. ‘Tell me about Aislinn Murray.’
Steve holds out the report the way you would wave raw meat at a mean dog. O’Kelly jerks his chin at his desk. ‘Leave that there. I’ll read it later. Now I want to hear it from you.’
He hasn’t told us to sit – which has to be a good sign: this isn’t going to take all night – so we stay standing. ‘We’re still waiting on the post-mortem,’ I say, ‘but Cooper’s preliminary says someone punched her in the face and she hit the back of her head on the fireplace. She was expecting a guy called Rory Fallon over for dinner. He admits he was on the spot at the relevant time, but he says she didn’t answer her door and he hadn’t a clue she was dead till we told him this afternoon.’
‘Huh,’ O’Kelly says. The hard sideways light from his desk lamp throws heavy shadows across his face, turning him one-eyed and unreadable. ‘Do you believe him?’
I shrug. ‘Half and half. Our main theory is she did answer her door, they had some kind of argument and Fallon threw the punch. He could be telling the truth about not knowing she was dead, though.’
‘Got any hard evidence?’
Less than twelve hours in, and I’m taking shit for not having a DNA match. I dig my hands into my jacket pockets so I won’t slap O’Kelly’s stupid spider plant off his desk.
Steve says, before I can answer, ‘The Bureau have the coat and gloves Fallon says he was wearing last night, and we’re searching his route home in case he ditched anything. He gave consent for us to search his flat and take any other clothes that look interesting, so a couple of the lads are on that. According to the techs, if he’s our guy we’ve got a good chance at blood or epithelials, or a fibre match to what they found on the body.’
‘I’ve asked a mate in the Bureau to put a rush on his stuff,’ I say, keeping my voice level. ‘We should have something preliminary tomorrow. We’ll let you know.’
O’Kelly matches up his fingertips and watches us. He says, ‘Breslin thinks ye need to quit wasting everyone’s time and arrest the little scumbag.’
I say, ‘It’s not Breslin’s case.’
‘Meaning what? You’ve got doubts? Or you just want to show everyone that Breslin’s not the boss of you?’
‘If anyone’s stupid enough to think Breslin’s the boss of us, I’m not gonna waste my time proving they’re wrong.’
‘So it’s doubts.’
In the dark outside the window, the wind is picking up. It sounds like wide country wind, barrelling down long straight miles with nothing to stand in its way, like the squad is standing high in the middle of empty nowhere. I say, ‘We’ll make the arrest when we’re ready.’
O’Kelly says, ‘Doubts about whether you’ve got enough to make it stick? Or about whether the boyfriend’s guilty at all?’
He’s looking at me, not at Steve. I say, ‘Doubts about whether we’re ready to arrest him.’
‘That doesn’t answer my question.’
There’s a silence. O’Kelly’s one eye, metallic in the lamplight, doesn’t blink.
I say, ‘I think he’s probably our guy. There’s no way I’m gonna arrest him based on nothing but my gut feeling. If that’s a problem, take the case off us and give it to Breslin. He’s welcome to it.’
O’Kelly eyeballs me for another minute; I stare back. Then he says, ‘Keep me updated. I want a full report on my desk every evening. Anything big shows up, you don’t save it for the report; you let me know straightaway. Is that clear?’
‘Clear,’ I say. Steve nods.
‘Good,’ O’Kelly says. He spins his chair away from the desk, to one of the stacks of files, and starts flipping paper. Dust swirls up into the light of his desk lamp. ‘Go get some kip. Ye look even worse than this morning.’
Steve and I wait till we’re back in the incident room, with the door shut, before we look at each other. He says, ‘What was that all about?’
I flick my coat off the back of my chair and swing it on. The floaters upped their rhythm when we came in; the room is all clicking keys and rustling paper. ‘That was the gaffer getting all up in our grille. What bit did you miss?’
‘Yeah, but why? He’s never given a damn about any of our cases before, unless we weren’t doing the business and he wanted to give us a bollocking.’
I throw my scarf around my neck and tuck the ends in tight: the dark at the window has a condensed look that says it’s cold out there. O’Kelly’s taken the shine off our bright new idea; gangsters and bent cops feel like a gymnast-level stretch, compared to just more people trying to screw me over. ‘Right. And even after the bollockings, I’m still here. Maybe the gaffer figures he needs to up his game.’
‘Or,’ Steve says, quieter. He hasn’t started packing up yet; he’s standing by his desk, one finger tapping an absent tattoo on the edge. ‘If he’s been wondering the same stuff we’ve been wondering, maybe for a while now, but he doesn’t want to say anything till he’s sure . . .’
I say, ‘I’m going home.’
From the outside, my gaff looks a lot like Aislinn Murray’s: a one-storey Victorian terraced cottage, thick-walled and low-ceilinged. It fits me just about right; when I let someone stay over – which isn’t often – I’m twitchy by morning, starting to feel the two of us barging up against the walls. The 1901 census says back then a couple were raising eight kids in it.
Get inside and my place has fuck-all in common with Aislinn’s. I have the original floorboards – sanded them and polished them myself, when I first bought the gaff – and the original fireplace, none of this gas fire and laminate shite; the walls are scraped back to bare brick – I did that myself, too – and whitewashed. The mortgage and my car payments eat enough of my paycheque that my furniture comes from Oxfam and the low end of Ikea, but at least nothing is gingham.
I throw my satchel on the sofa, turn off the alarm and switch on the coffee machine. I’ve got a text from my mate Lisa:
We’re in pub get down here!
I text her back
Pulled a double shift, gonna crash.
This is true enough – I’ve been up for more than twenty-four hours, and my eyes aren’t focusing right – but I could still have done with a pint and a laugh with a bunch of people who don’t think I’m poison. Except that’s the reason I’m staying in. You spend long enough being treated like you’re wearing a shit on me sign, you start to worry that the sign’s developing a reality of its own and now anyone you talk to can see it. In my mates’ heads I’m Antoinette the top cop, smart kickass successful Antoinette, nobody fucks with Antoinette. I want to keep it that way. I’ve turned down a lot of pints, the last few months.
Plus, odds are the gang in the pub includes my mate with the security firm. I don’t want him offering me the job again. I’m not gonna take it – not tonight, anyway, not with that dare still flashing at me – but I’m not ready for him to take it off the table.
I should throw some dinner into me and crash out, but I hate wasting time on sleep even worse than I hate wasting it on food. I stick some pasta ready-meal thing in the microwave; while it heats up, I ring my ma, which I do every night, I’m not sure why. My ma isn’t the type to bitch about her back problems or update me on which of her friends’ kids are up the pole and what she found while she was emptying some middle manager’s bin, which doesn’t leave her a lot to talk about. Me, when I’m in a good mood, I tell her the basic outline of my day. When I’m not, I give her the details: what the wounds looked like, what the parents said while they sobbed. Sometimes I catch myself at the scene filing away the bad stuff, thinking this is gonna be the one that finally gets to her, gets even just a sharp breath or a snap at me to leave it. So far nothing ever has.
‘Howya,’ my ma says. Click of a lighter. She has a smoke while we talk; when she puts it out, we hang up.
I hit the button for an espresso. ‘Howya.’
‘Any news?’
‘Me and Moran pulled a street fight. Couple of drunk fellas jumped another one, danced on his head. His eyeball was out on the footpath.’
‘Huh,’ my ma says, and inhales. ‘Anything else strange?’
I don’t feel like talking about Aislinn. Too much shite swirling around it, too much stuff I don’t have a handle on; I don’t tell my ma about anything I haven’t got well sussed. ‘Nah. Lisa texted me to go for a pint with the lads, but I’m shattered. Gonna crash.’
My ma lets that lie for a beat, just long enough to let me know I’m not getting away with it, before she says, ‘Marie Lane said you’re in the newspaper.’
Of course she bleeding did. ‘Did she, yeah?’
‘Not about any street fight. About some young one that got killed in her own house. The paper made you out to be a right gobshite.’
I swap out the coffee pod and hit the espresso button again: I’m gonna need a double. ‘It’s just a bog-standard murder. It made the paper because your woman was a blonde who wore a shit-ton of makeup. The journalist doesn’t like me. End of story.’
A lot of people’s mas would get a taste of the weakness, burrow in and suck out every last drop. Not mine. My ma just wanted to make it clear who’s the boss of this conversation, and who needs to up her game if she wants to bullshit a pro. Now that she’s made her point, she drops it. ‘Lenny asked me again can he move in.’
Lenny and my ma have been together nine years, off and on. He’s all right. ‘And?’
She lets out a hoarse laugh and a blow of smoke together. ‘And I told him he must be joking. If I wanted his smelly jocks in my room, they’d be there by now. He’s talking bollix anyway; he no more wants to eat my cooking, rather get his dinners down the chipper . . .’
She makes me laugh about Lenny till she’s finished her smoke and we hang up. The microwave beeps. I take the pasta thing and my coffee to the sofa and open my laptop.
I hit the dating sites. Over my own dead body would I do this at work – one glance over my shoulder, or one trawl through my computer when I’m out of the squad room, and I can already hear the whoops:
Jaysus, lads, Conway’s doing the internet dating! – Yeah, frigidbitches.com – There’s a market for everything these days – For her? You serious? – Hey, we all know she gives a good gobble or she wouldn’t be here, she can put that on her profile . . .
But if Mr Loverman exists, Aislinn met him somehow. Checking out her work colleagues and her evening classes won’t cover the crim angle, and going by her phone and by Lucy, she didn’t have much of a social life. Unless she found herself a gangster who was learning to crochet, the internet is my best bet.
I set up accounts using a throwaway e-mail address, Aislinn’s description and a smirking blonde from Google Images, just in case our man has a type and goes looking for a replacement girlfriend, and I poke around for a while. The sites mostly use handles, not names – j-wow79, footballguy12345 – and Aislinn’s description matches half the girls on there. I filter for age and type and skim the sea of duckfaced blond selfies till my eyes bubble, but there’s no sign of her.
I believe in been positive in life whats for us wont pass us by lol . . . I like romance, spontaneity, respect, honesty, genuineness, good conversation . . . Looking to chat n just go with the flow message me you never know what might happen!!!
The pasta thing has gone cold and slimy. I shove down the last mouthful anyway. Outside the window my street is dark, the streetlamps fighting the night and losing. The wind is punching around a paper bag from the chipper, slamming it up against a wall, holding it there for a second before tossing it down the road again. The old one from Number 12 hurries past, pushing her tartan shopping trolley, headscarf bent low.
I switch to the guys’ photos and scan for a face that’s familiar from work or from news stories: nothing, not that a high-profile gangster is gonna upload his pic on some dating site.
First time on a site like this not really sure what to say, looking for someone easy going no drama good sense of humour . . . I’m a bit mad will say anything just a wild n crazy guy so if u think u can handle me give me a text!!
These people are pissing me off. The neediness of it, all of them jumping up and down and waving their arms and doing their cutest little booty-shakes for the internet:
Me, look at me, like me, please oh please want me!!!
The because-I’m-worth-it shower (
Looking for someone tall, slim, very fit, no smokers, no drugs, no kids, no pets, must have full-time job and own car, must like fusion cuisine, speak at least three languages,
enjoy bikram yoga and acid jazz . . .
) are just as bad: ordering their relationships from the online menu because of course you have to have one, same as you have to have a state-of-the-art sound system and a pimped-out new car, and it’s important to make sure you get exactly what you want. The only ones I can respect are the ones there on business: Ukrainian superbabes looking for older men down the country, with a view to marriage. All the rest could do with a good kick up the hole and a double shot of self-respect.