Authors: Tana French
‘No,’ I say. I can hear Steve in my head going
We need to get on with Breslin
, but I want to see what happens. ‘I’m bearing nothing in mind. Unless I missed your promotion, we’re on the same squad, and this is my investigation. Which means you’re the cheeky little bollix who’s getting above himself, and you’re the one who needs to bear in mind who’s who here.’
For a second I think I’ve taken it too far, but Breslin forces his face into weary resignation, like a teacher who should never have expected better from that problem student. ‘OK, Conway. Next time I consider contributing a little extra to
your
investigation, I’ll be sure and run it by you first.’ Eye-roll. ‘Does that make you feel better?’
‘Yeah. It does.’
‘Good. So could you maybe pull that stick out of your arse?’
‘I . . . Jaysus.’ I dial it right back, turn all sheepish. ‘I didn’t mean to . . .’ I glance down the corridor, making sure no one’s heard me being a bad little D. ‘It’s not easy, you know? Having someone like you on board. It’s pretty intimidating. I don’t always manage to . . . yeah. Manage to deal with it right.’
‘Well,’ Breslin says. He takes his time thinking that over, to teach me a lesson, but he’s puffing out with self-satisfaction. ‘I suppose I can see that. That’s no excuse for getting defensive, though. We’re on the same team here.’
‘I know, yeah. I apologise.’ I won’t lick arse for the sake of getting wankers to like me, but for the sake of getting wankers, I can slurp with the best. ‘And I do appreciate the help, and the advice. Even if I’m not the best at showing it.’
Breslin nods. ‘All right,’ he says, all magnanimous. ‘We’ll say no more about it.’
‘Thanks,’ I say. ‘Where are you headed?’
‘I’ve got appointments with more of Rory’s KAs. If that’s still all right with you.’
He’s smiling, although there’s an edge underneath. ‘That’d be great,’ I say. ‘Thanks a million. See you later.’
And I give him a humble duck of my head and start back up towards the incident room. McCann is gone off the upstairs landing. I’m on the top floor and turning down the corridor before I hear Breslin’s footsteps start again, echoing around the stairwell in slow cold claps.
The incident room is getting on grand without me, which probably should feel like a good thing. The floaters are busy little bees and making sure it shows: Gaffney is scribbling, Meehan’s finishing up a phone call; Kellegher and Reilly are hunched towards their monitors, fast-forwarding through jerky CCTV footage. Stanton and Deasy are somewhere else, presumably at Aislinn’s work. Steve has our boss desk all to himself, he’s turned it into a nest of printouts and Kit Kat bars, and he’s whistling peacefully while he works his way through them. He looks happy.
‘Morning, all,’ I say, throwing my stuff onto my desk. The floaters whip out smiles like they love me. If anyone’s got to any of them – and someone almost definitely has: whatever Breslin’s agenda is, the first thing he would need is at least one floater in his pocket – they’re good at hiding it.
‘Howya,’ Steve says. ‘Sorted?’
‘Yeah.’ I didn’t give him details, just said I wanted some extra from the scumbag witness, and he didn’t ask. ‘Anything I should know?’
‘Sophie e-mailed us some stuff, just now.’ He lifts a page.
‘I was talking to her, yeah.’ I sling my coat over the back of my chair. ‘One of her guys is gonna wangle us Aislinn’s e-mail records. Have you got her phone logs?’
‘Yeah. My guy at Meteor sent them over.’ Steve examines his heaps of paper, pats the right one. ‘Breslin pulled Rory’s; he says there’s nothing that jumps out, no calls to anyone but Aislinn on Saturday night, no call to Stoneybatter station yesterday morning, and no link to Lucy Riordan. He’s working on getting the actual texts, see if there’s anything in there.’
‘Gaffney,’ I say. ‘Any word on the number that called it in?’
Gaffney jumps. ‘Yeah – yes; I’ve done that, yes. I got hold of the number. But it’s unregistered.’
Steve says, ‘I can’t see any reason why Rory would have a spare unregistered mobile. One that didn’t show up in the search of his flat.’
While most of the gang boys have more unregistered phones than they can keep track of. ‘You never know,’ I say. ‘But yeah: it looks like Rory probably wasn’t the one who called it in. We’ll pull full records for the phone, see if those give us some clue who owns it. Moran, can you get onto that?’
Steve nods, writing. Gaffney looks wounded, but that’s tough: if that phone log is full of calls to drug dealers, me and Steve need to know before anyone else does.
‘Meehan,’ I say, ‘you were timing the route Fallon says he took around Stoneybatter. How’d that go?’
‘According to Fallon’s statement,’ Meehan says, spinning his chair round to face us, ‘he got off the bus just before half-seven, and he knocked on Aislinn’s door just before eight – that part’s confirmed by the witness who was walking his dog. So that’s half an hour for the whole walk – from the bus stop to the top of Viking Gardens, up to Tesco and buy flowers, back down to her house. When I went at a normal pace, it came out at twenty-seven minutes. When I went as fast as I could without actually running, I knocked six minutes off that.’
I say, ‘Meaning Rory could have had almost ten minutes to spare.’
‘More,’ Steve says. ‘Here’s the good part. Stanton pulled CCTV from the 39A route and had a look, first thing this morning. Rory got on the bus at ten to seven, not just before seven like he told us, and he got off it at quarter past, not just before half. He could’ve misremembered, or just been estimating the times, but . . .’
‘But he was obsessing about being late to Aislinn’s,’ I say, ‘in case she got her feelings hurt and dumped him and his life was ruined or whatever. Nah: he didn’t estimate, and he didn’t misremember. He’s got anything up to twenty-five minutes unaccounted for, and he was fudging because he doesn’t want us knowing that.’ That blood-smell flares at the back of my nose again. He’s so tempting, Rory, all fluffy and big-eyed and just begging for the killer bite; it would be so satisfying to hammer on his door, drag him back in and shove his face up against the CCTV screen. ‘Good. When we bring him back in, he’d better have a great explanation for what he was doing. Have we got footage from the area yet?’
‘Yeah,’ Kellegher says, leaning back from his monitor. Kellegher is long, freckly, laid-back, and useful enough that he’s going to end up on the squad sooner or later. ‘The bad news is, there’s no cameras between the 39A stop and Viking Gardens, or between Viking Gardens and the Tesco – so we can’t verify Fallon’s route, or the timing. But we’ve got him buying the flowers in Tesco. He paid at 7.51, which matches his story.’
‘No surprise there,’ I say. ‘He had to know Tesco would have him on camera; he wouldn’t lie about that. We need to widen the area of Stoneybatter where we’re pulling CCTV. Whatever Rory was doing in that missing time, it could have taken him off the route he gave us. Reilly, you can get on that.’ Meehan reaches for the book of jobs.
Reilly glances out the window – it’s getting ready to rain – and back at his monitor. ‘I’m not done watching what we’ve got.’
Reilly was a year behind me in training college. He’s a lot less useful than Kellegher, but I’m guessing he’ll make the squad sooner, just going by how beautifully he’d fit in with this shower. ‘Kellegher can finish that up,’ I say. ‘With twenty minutes to spare, Fallon could have got, say, half a mile off the route he gave us. Do a half-mile radius, to start with. See you later.’
Reilly’s chin moves and he gives me a piggy stare, but he heaves himself out of his chair and starts disentangling his coat. ‘Kellegher,’ I say. ‘Tell me you’ve got some good news to go with that.’
‘Some, yeah. We’ve picked up Fallon in four locations between Stoneybatter and Ranelagh, on his way home. I’ve mapped them up there.’ Kellegher nods at a new map on the whiteboard, complete with X’s and arrows and a halo of grainy time-stamped photos. ‘They’re consistent with his statement.’
I take a look. The slight guy in the black overcoat has his head down, against the rain and his bad evening, but it’s Rory, all right. In the earliest shot, on the northside quays, there’s a smashed-looking bunch of flowers sticking out of his armpit; by the time he gets across the river into Temple Bar, it’s gone.
‘Do we ever get a look at his hands?’ I ask.
‘Nah. In his pockets.’
‘Meehan,’ I say. ‘I need you to time Fallon’s route home. I want to see if he could have taken a detour anywhere along the way – gone off to ditch his gloves, or called in to a mate. Kellegher: what pace is he going on the CCTV?’
‘Brisk, I’d call it,’ Kellegher says, considering the Temple Bar shot, where Rory’s been shouldered off the pavement by a howling stag do wearing fake tits and waving beer cans. ‘Not jogging or anything, but he wanted to get home, all right. Yeah: brisk.’
‘You heard the man,’ I tell Meehan. ‘Viking Gardens to the Wayward Bookshop, nice and brisk, and record the times when you hit the places where the CCTV caught Rory.’
‘I’m going to get fit on this one,’ Meehan says, pushing his chair back.
‘Make it brisk enough and you might beat the rain,’ I say. ‘Thanks. Kellegher, how much of that footage have you got left to watch?’
‘Not a lot.’
‘When you’re done, go have chats with the people who were at the book launch where Aislinn and Rory met. See how it looked: whether one of them was doing the chasing, whether either of them said anything interesting about the other, anything you can pick up. Yeah?’
Meehan scribbles that in the book on his way out. Kellegher gives me the thumbs-up and hits fast-forward on the CCTV – little dark figures spin and bobble down the street like wind-up toys. I go back to our desk and have a look over Steve’s shoulder.
‘These are Aislinn’s phone logs,’ he says, tapping a pile of paper, ‘and this is the stuff Sophie e-mailed us, what was on the actual phone. I want to cross-check, see if anyone deleted anything along the way.’
‘Great minds,’ I say. ‘I was going to say that to you.’ Lower: ‘We need a chat. Not here.’ Having to take my chats out of my own incident room is fucked up, but there’s no way to know which of the floaters belong to Breslin.
Steve nods. ‘We need to search Aislinn’s gaff anyway.’
‘That’ll work. Let’s go.’
He bins his Kit Kat wrappers, because he was brought up right. ‘While we’re in Stoneybatter, fancy showing me round your locals?’
‘Why?’
‘Maybe they went for the odd pint.’
The floaters look like they’re absorbed in their jobs, but I keep my voice down anyway. It’s getting to be a habit. ‘Who? Aislinn and her fella? A guy having a secret affair, you think he’s going to be snogging the girlfriend down the pub?’
‘They were seeing each other for around six months, according to Lucy. You can’t spend six months just staying in and shagging.’ Steve digs around the desk, finds a photo of Aislinn and sticks it in his coat pocket. ‘The pubs’ll be opening soon. Come on.’
I stay put. ‘Even if he exists, they wouldn’t have gone to one of my locals. Lucy said Aislinn was all about the fancy club scene; a pub in Stoneybatter wouldn’t have been her thing. To put it mildly.’
‘So less chance of being spotted. And if he’s married, then they were doing their shagging at Aislinn’s place; if they got stir-crazy and snuck out for a quick pint, it’d be somewhere around there.’ Steve throws his coat on, glancing at the window. ‘The fresh air’ll do us good.’
‘We don’t have fresh air in Stoneybatter. We’re too cool for that culchie crap. And you think a barman’s going to remember some chick who looked exactly like half the twenty-something women in Dublin?’
‘You remembered her. And barmen have good memories for faces.’ Steve pulls my coat off the back of my chair and holds it up, valet-style. ‘Humour me.’
‘Give me that,’ I say, whipping the coat off him, but I put it on. ‘And sort those.’ I jerk my chin at Steve’s printouts and flick him a warning look. He starts organising the paper into a stack.
Gaffney is looking over. I say, ‘Gaffney, spread the word: case meeting at half-five. And go find Breslin. You’re supposed to be shadowing him, remember? What are you even doing here?’
‘But he said—’ Gaffney looks petrified; the poor bastard is seeing his career going splat all over the carpet. ‘I did shadow Detective Breslin, like, all yesterday evening, and this morning – I was taking notes for him, and he was explaining to me how ye work, and all . . . It was only when he was heading out – he said I was grand to work on my own now, and you’d probably be needing me here more than he needed me out there, so, I mean . . .’
Breslin was right, obviously: Gaffney is well able to pull financials and make phone calls without someone holding his hand, or he wouldn’t be in the floater pool to begin with. But he’s also well able to take notes during interviews, and Breslin isn’t the type to turn down the obedient PA that he deserves; not unless he wants the freedom to nudge witnesses his way, with no one else there to notice.
Gaffney has run down and is staring at me pathetically. There’s no point sending him after Breslin; Breslin will find some excuse to slither out of it, or he just won’t answer his phone. ‘You’re grand,’ I say. ‘Don’t worry about it. You’ve got plenty of jobs to keep you going.’