Authors: Tana French
‘Could’ve. But we still don’t have a good reason why he would’ve snapped, and as far as we can find, he’s got no experience with violence. Something as vicious as that punch, it’s not easy; not for someone who hasn’t touched another person since he was nine and gave his brother a dig. It’d come more naturally to someone who was in practice.’
‘Nah nah nah.’ I give my chair a shove back to my end of the desk – even the wheels on the Incident Room C chairs work better. ‘You heard Rory. All the most intense shit in that guy’s life goes on inside his head. People like that, you can’t go by what you see. We don’t know what he’s been practising in there; for all we know, he’s spent years rolling out a whole alternative life where he’s a cage fighter. When the pressure was on, it came popping out, and bang.’
The thought of that punch, bone crunching against stone, flashes through both our heads. Steve is right, it’s hard to see Rory on the end of that, but that could be because neither of us wants to. ‘This is why I keep telling you to quit the “if” crap,’ I say. ‘Hazardous to your health.’
‘Don’t worry,’ Steve says, going back to his paperwork. ‘In my fantasy life I’m the super-detective who never misses a solve.’
‘Deadly. Now all we have to do is get you under enough pressure that he pops out.’
Steve glances over, and the abrupt, wry snap of the look startles me. For a moment I think he’s going to say something, but then he shakes his head and starts running his Biro down a line of phone numbers.
Just to be clear: I know, and what with Steve not being a certified moron I assume he knows too, that we should be on our knees praying Rory Fallon is all there is to this case. If we find any evidence that Breslin is bent, we’re in deep shite.
If you catch another cop breaking the rules, or the law, or both, your first-line option is to keep your mouth shut. This is what practically everyone does about the pissant stuff like squaring traffic tickets and running private background checks: you look the other way, because it’s not worth the hassle and because sooner or later you could be the one who needs someone to blink. But even if we want to go that route – which I’m nowhere near sure I do – it’s not gonna be that easy this time, not if whatever we find is tangled up with our murder case.
Your second option, the one you’re supposed to take, is a visit to Internal Affairs. I’ve never tried it. I hear sometimes it gets the job done. Maybe once in a while it even gets the job done without word getting around and turning you into radioactive waste, and without you spending the rest of your life feeling like a rat.
Your third option is to have a chat with the guy, tell him he needs to knock it off, for the sake of his conscience or his career or his family or whatever. Maybe this one sometimes works, too. I can just see the look on Breslin’s face if I go finger-wagging at him about what a bold boy he’s been. If I don’t drown in the spill of self-righteous outrage, I’ll spend what’s left of my career trying to look over both shoulders at once.
Your fourth option is to go to your gaffer, who’ll presumably give you wise fatherly pats on the shoulder, tell you you did the right thing, and do either Option 2 or Option 3 for you. Seeing what my relationship with O’Kelly is like, and what his relationship with Breslin is like, I’m gonna go ahead and figure that – even if I wanted to go running to Big Daddy for help – this one is off the table.
Your fifth option is to drop a couple of hints and get in on the action. Maybe you actually want to join in the fun; maybe you just want a little off the top of the other guy’s kickback, in exchange for keeping your mouth shut. I don’t like money enough to sell myself for it, and I don’t like anything enough to tie my life to some scumbag who’s already proven he can’t be trusted.
Your sixth option is to find yourself a journalist, one who has balls the size of watermelons and doesn’t mind being pulled over for drink-driving every other day for the rest of his life, and go full-on whistleblower.
None of those sound good to me. I’m loving this chase, every second of it. I don’t give a damn whether that means I’m a bad person. But I know if we actually catch what we’re hunting, it’s probably gonna rip our faces off.
I’m having a hard time sitting still. Every few minutes I turn my head to look at Steve, sprawled over his desk like a student, fingers dug into that orange hair, frowning down at his whirlpool of paper. I can’t tell what’s going on in there. A couple of times I actually have my mouth open to ask him:
If. What do we do if?
Every time, I end up shutting my mouth again and going back to work.
The energy in an incident room usually dips in the middle of the afternoon, same as the energy in any office, but today it stays running high. Partly it’s the room, making us all want to prove we’re up to its standards, but partly it’s me. The mood comes from the top, and that dare is whirling in my mind like a bad-boy lover, speeding up my heartbeat every time it bobs to the surface, beckoning and menacing. The wicked grin of it keeps me working flat out, and when I finish fine-tooth-combing reports it keeps me up and moving around the room, adding to the whiteboard, grabbing tip-line sheets – some anonymous guy is positive he’s seen Aislinn on a very specialised website, stamping on bugs, which sounds unlikely but which the lucky people in Computer Crime will get to investigate anyway. I check out what the floaters are doing, toss out snippets of well-done and try-this – I can do the managerial shite just fine, when I feel like it. I have a laugh with Kellegher, tell Stanton and Deasy how their interviews with Aislinn’s colleagues were bang on. Breslin would be proud of me. The thought of him – he should be back soon – sets me circling again.
Steve’s caught it too: he’s on the phone, trying to light a fire under his Meteor guy for the full records on that unregistered phone. We could go out, burn off that fizz interviewing witnesses, but I don’t want to go anywhere. I don’t want to miss Breslin.
Gaffney has finished his list of Aislinn’s evening classes – which if I wasn’t in a good mood would be depressing as hell: Aislinn genuinely paid actual money for a class called ReStyle You!, with the exclamation mark, also for one on wine appreciation and something called Busy Babes Boot Camp – and he’s ringing round for lists of students. I take the financials off him and go through them for anomalies, while Breslin’s not there to look over my shoulder.
No unexplained sums of money into or out of Aislinn’s current account. The only thing that sticks out is that Lucy was right, Aislinn had a fair bit of cash: she opened a savings account the same month she started work, back in 2006, and most of her salary went straight in there. In the last couple of years she cut back on the saving and spent the extra on chichi clothes websites, but she still had over thirty grand stashed away. She wasn’t carrying any debt – the Greystones home paid for the Stoneybatter cottage and for her crappy second-hand Polo, and she paid off her credit card by direct debit. If she wanted to go travelling or go to college, she would have been well able to do it. She would also have been well able to lend someone a few grand, if someone had asked.
Rory’s financials are more complicated than Aislinn’s, what with the bookshop, and nowhere near as healthy. Nothing remotely dodgy-looking – if there are gangsters in this case, they aren’t laundering their cash through the Wayward Bookshop just to make our lives more interesting – but the business is barely keeping its head above water: in the five years Rory’s owned it, sales have dropped by a third and he’s had to let his part-timer go. The salary he’s taking would look scabby to a burger-flipper. Breslin wasn’t wrong about that Pestle dinner blowing the budget.
We’ve already seen how hard Rory takes humiliation. If he went begging to Aislinn and she slapped him down, his inner Hulk could well have burst his good going-out jumper.
I’m about to call Steve over for a look – he’s up at the whiteboard – when a skinny kid with tufty fair hair and a crap suit sticks his head round the incident-room door. ‘Um,’ he says. ‘Detective Conway?’
‘Yeah.’
He edges between the desks to me like he expects someone to grab him in a headlock halfway. ‘Detective O’Rourke sent me, from Missing Persons? Sorry it took so long; I’ve been downstairs for a while, actually, but some guy – um, I mean, another detective? – he told me you were out. He said I could give it to him, but Detective O’Rourke told me just you, so I was waiting? And then I thought maybe I should check, like just in case—’
‘I’m here now,’ I say. ‘Let’s have it.’
He vanishes again. I catch Steve’s eye as he turns from the whiteboard, jerk my head to say
Over here.
None of the floaters seem to be paying any attention, but I’m not gonna bank on that.
‘What’s up?’ Steve asks.
‘The file on Aislinn’s da. Don’t make a big deal of it.’
The kid reappears lugging a cardboard box that probably weighs more than he does. Steve leans over his half of the desk and messes with paper, ignoring him.
‘Oof,’ the kid says, dumping the box by my chair and staggering backwards. ‘And this.’ He pulls an envelope out of his pocket and hands it over.
‘Thanks,’ I say. ‘The guy who thought I was out: what’d he look like?’
The kid tries to disappear into his suit. I wait him out. ‘Um,’ he says, in the end. ‘Like, late forties? Five ten, average build? Dark hair, kind of curly, some grey? Stubble?’
Which sounds a whole lot like McCann.
There’s no good reason why McCann should give a damn what anyone’s sending me.
‘Great,’ I say. ‘I’ll have to let him know I’m in here this week. Thanks.’
The kid hovers hopefully, waiting for his pat on the head. ‘I’ll tell Detective O’Rourke you did a good job,’ I say. ‘Bye.’
He edges off. Steve says, ‘What guy who thought you were out?’
‘Someone tried to intercept this stuff.’ I know I sound paranoid. I don’t care. ‘McCann, by the sound of it.’
I watch Steve’s mind go through the same steps mine did. ‘Breslin doesn’t know we’re looking into Aislinn’s da.’
‘Right. McCann wasn’t after this, specifically; he was just going for it because it was there.’
Steve says, ‘Breslin’ll be back soon. You want to take this lot somewhere else?’
‘Fuck that.’ It won’t do any good – if Breslin gets in while we’re gone, someone’s gonna tell him we disappeared hauling a great big box of paper. And besides, this is my incident room. I’m fucked if I’m gonna scuttle off to some closet. ‘We’ll read fast.’
I’m already ripping open the envelope. Steve pulls his chair towards mine – casually, checking his phone for messages at the same time, nothing important going on here.
The note says,
Hiya Conway, file on your missing guy. Word of advice as a mate, no back seat driving OK? You don’t like anything keep your big gob shut. I did a bit on the case so any questions give me a ring. GO’R
‘Huh?’ Steve says. ‘Keep your gob shut about what?’
‘No clue.’ I stick the letter in my pocket, for the shredder. ‘Might make sense once we’ve had a look through that lot.’
We read the initial report together, me keeping one eye on the room to see if any of the floaters are looking interested. The lead D was a guy called Feeney; I saw his name on old paperwork when I was in Missing Persons, but he retired years before I came on board. He’s probably dead by now. If we need the inside scoop, we’ll just have to hope Gary’s got it.
In 1998, Desmond Joseph Murray was thirty-three years old, a taxi driver, living in Greystones and working out of Dublin city centre. The photos attached to the file show a slight guy, medium height, with neat brown hair and a sweet, lopsided smile. I barely clocked him in Aislinn’s photo albums. So busy staring at her and hoping her face would trigger my memory, I missed what was right in front of me.
There’s one family shot in there. The wife was small, dark, groomed and good-looking; very good-looking, in the big-eyed, pouty, helpless way that makes me want to heave. And there’s Aislinn, with her too-tight plaits and a big grin, snuggled into the circle of her father’s arm.
‘You know who he reminds me of?’ Steve says. ‘Our boy Rory.’
I tilt the photo my way. He’s right; they don’t look alike, exactly, but they’re definitely the same type. ‘For fuck’s
sake
,’ I say. ‘What a bleeding cliché. How badly did that stupid bitch need to get a grip?’
‘She was trying to. Give her credit for that, at least.’
Clouds are building up, making the light at the windows shift and heave; the incident room feels precarious and at risk, a ship on a bad sea or an island house with a storm coming in. Something – that light, maybe, or Steve’s quiet voice dissipating out through all the empty space, fading to nothing before it can reach the walls – something makes the words sound, out of nowhere, massively sad. I don’t feel like giving Aislinn credit for anything, or like giving a fuck about her except in terms of basic professional pride, but just for that moment everything about her seems dense enough with sadness to drop you like a sandbag.
I say, ‘What I think of her doesn’t matter. Read.’
Just after three in the afternoon of the fifth of February, Desmond left home in his taxi to follow his usual Thursday routine: pick up his nine-year-old daughter Aislinn from school, drop her home, then head into Dublin to work until the closing-time crowds died down around one in the morning. He picked up Aislinn and dropped her off according to plan. That was the last his family saw of him.