Authors: Tana French
The car is cold. Even after I slam the door, I can still hear that unceasing roll of wind through too much grass. Part of me wants to floor it out of there, but I can’t think of anything I’m in a hurry to reach.
When I get back to the incident room, Steve is still gone. The floaters are eating lunch and bitching about some news story bitching about cops. Breslin is at his desk, with his chair tilted back and his feet up, finishing a sausage roll and flicking through the
Courier
.
‘Ah,’ he says, bringing his chair legs down and tossing his paper on the desk, when he sees me. ‘Just the woman I’ve been waiting for. Been doing anything interesting?’
‘Aislinn’s exes,’ I say, peeling my coat off. ‘Nothing worth hearing. We’ll check the alibis and cross them off the list.’ The
Courier
’s front-page headline says who was coming to dinner? Someone’s told Crowley about Aislinn’s date.
Breslin swings his feet off his desk. ‘I need to stretch my legs after that,’ he says, patting his stomach. ‘Let’s go for a stroll.’
‘I’ve got notes to type up.’
‘They can wait.’ Lower: ‘I’ve got something that can’t.’
Maybe he’s gonna offer to cut me in on his imaginary sideline. I don’t bother putting much thought into whether to play along, seeing as it doesn’t matter either way, and his way gets me out of that incident room. ‘Why not,’ I say, and enjoy the flick of surprise on his face as I turn around and head back out the door.
‘So I talked to Rory’s exes,’ Breslin says, on our way down the corridor. I wonder where we’re going for his chat. It’s hit me this week, for the first time, how little privacy we all have from each other. People come and go in the canteen, the squad room, the locker room; the interview rooms have observation windows and audio feeds. I never realised before how you would need the squad to be part of you, close and reliable as your own body, in order to survive it.
‘And?’ I say.
Breslin grins. ‘How did he put it? His usual type is more “casual” than Aislinn? I’m sure they’re all very nice girls, but my God, I wanted to march the whole lot of them into some makeover show and tell the stylists to bring out the heavy artillery.’ He heads down the stairs at a jog. ‘You know those godawful hairy ethnic hoodies that students used to wear back in the nineties, to show you they were planning to go backpacking in Goa someday? I swear the last ex was actually wearing one of those.’
‘They give us anything?’
‘Yes and no. All of them say Rory was a perfect little gentleman: never hit them, never yelled at them, no controlling behaviour, no jealous rages, no turning nasty when he didn’t get his way, none of that.’ He turns down the corridor and cracks the door of Incident Room E, the shitty ex-locker-room. Empty. ‘In here.’
He holds the door for me. I get the message: in here, where I would be already if it wasn’t for Breslin helping me out. The place is hot and still stinks of sweaty gym gear; the tiny whiteboard is stained where someone used the wrong kind of marker, and all the chairs look sticky. I don’t sit down.
‘But here’s the interesting part,’ Breslin says, closing the door behind us. ‘Two of the exes, including the most recent one, say they dumped Rory because he was too intense. One girl’s exact words were “too full-on”; the other one said he was “taking things way too quickly”. I thought she was being coy, but it turned out she wasn’t talking about sex: she had no problem shagging his brains out on the second date, God bless her. The young people nowadays don’t know how good they’ve got it.’
‘So what was she talking about?’
‘Basically, by the time they’d been seeing each other for a few months, Rory was starting to think this was some great epic romance, while the girl was still deciding whether she even wanted a serious relationship. She says she really liked him, but she was only twenty-four; she was just looking for a few laughs and some intellectual conversation – she’s doing a PhD in Russian literature – with plenty of sex thrown in. She wasn’t ready for someone who kept talking about how amazing it would be to go around the world together.’ Breslin examines the wall by the door, flicks away a speck of something and leans against it. ‘So she dumped him. The other girl said the same thing, give or take. I keep hearing how women are dying for a guy who’s not scared of commitment, but it looks like Rory might be a little too much of a good thing.’
According to Aislinn’s second ex, when the relationship started getting real, she was out of there – although she blamed that on the sick ma. ‘So when Rory told us him and Aislinn fell madly in love at first sight,’ I say, ‘that doesn’t mean Aislinn felt the same way.’
‘Exactly. Remember what he said about their date at Pestle? Every time he thought they were getting on like a house on fire, she’d go quiet on him and he’d have to kick-start the conversation again? That sounds to me like the other side of the story – if only we could hear it – would go, “He kept getting way too intense, but hey, he’s a nice guy, so I tried to give him every chance . . .” ’
‘The only thing is,’ I say, ‘that doesn’t fit with what the best mate told us. She was positive that Aislinn was head over heels. And those texts on Aislinn’s phone, about how excited she was, getting ready for Rory to come over? There’s no hint anywhere that she was backing away. If Rory was full-on, Aislinn was fine with that.’
Breslin pulls out his phone, which is the size of his head and in a flashy stainless-steel case, and spins it in his hand. He says, ‘I’ve got to admit something here. I’ve been going back and forth all morning on whether to share this with you or not.’
Yesterday, I might have bitten. Instead I keep my mouth shut and wait.
When he realises I’m not gonna beg, he sighs, spinning the phone again. Light flashes off it in oily grey streaks. ‘I’m a team player, basically. People have this idea of me as some high achiever, but I’m actually a big believer in teamwork. But that only flies if the other people on your team are working the same way. Do you get where I’m going here, Conway?’
I say, ‘I’m thick. Go ahead and spell it out for me.’
Breslin pretends to think that over. The heat and the stench are inflating into a solid thing pressing in on us. ‘You’re sure you want to hear this?’
‘You’re the one who says you’ve got something to tell me. Yeah, I’m positive I want you to just spit it out, instead of wiggling around it dropping hints.’
Breslin sighs again. ‘OK,’ he says, as a big favour. ‘Here you go: you go into every interaction treating the other person like your enemy. Now we both know in some cases you’ve got decent reasons for that, but even when you’ve got no reason at all, you’re straight into attack mode. That creates an atmosphere where even the most dedicated team player is going to think twice before he shares anything with you.’
In other words, it’s my fault he’s been concealing evidence from the lead D. Even if there was still a reason to play along, I’ve got nothing left to do it with. ‘Spit it or don’t,’ I say. ‘If you’re not going to, then tell me, so I can go type up my notes.’
He stares me out of it. I can’t even be arsed giving him a stare back. He’s gonna tell me; he’s only dying to. He’s just seeing what he can wring out of me in exchange.
‘Conway,’ he says, putting in all the ferocious patience he can fit. ‘Do you take my point here? At least tell me you get my point.’
‘Yeah. I’m a bitch. I knew that already.’ I move to go.
‘All right,’ Breslin says, smooth but fast. ‘I guess I’ve got to know you well enough, this week, that I can take the rest as read.’
‘Whatever.’
‘Our boy Reilly. Remember how he was pulling CCTV footage for Stoneybatter?’
After a moment I take a step back, away from the door.
‘Well,’ Breslin says, with a touch of a smile to show we’re buddies again. ‘Reilly’s turned out to be a bit of a bright spark. While he was at it, he pulled the last four weeks – or as much as he could get; some places had taped over it. And he stayed in till five this morning with his finger on the fast-forward button.’
The slithery fuck. I say, ‘He better have a very good reason why I’m hearing this from you, not from him.’
‘Ah, well. I’m going to ask you to cut the kid some slack there. I get the feeling he wanted to impress me.’ Breslin almost manages to hold back the fat, self-satisfied smirk. ‘No harm in that. Get in a few more years on the squad and you’ll have newbies flexing their guns for you, too.’
I get the message:
If you last another few years.
I say, ‘What’d he get?’
‘Here’s a taster,’ Breslin says. ‘This is just a quick clip I shot off the monitor; there’s more where it came from.’
He swipes, taps, and holds out the phone to me. I take it.
Fuzzy colour footage, but I’m in the shop often enough that I recognise it straightaway: Tesco on Prussia Street. And I recognise the skinny guy taking a bottle of Lucozade out of the fridge and bringing it over to the self-checkout. The delicate profile, the angle of the head, the slight hunch to the shoulders, the drifting way his hands move: I spent hours focusing on every detail of him, just two days ago.
I say, ‘That’s Rory Fallon.’
‘Him or his clone. And have a look at this.’
Breslin leans in, pinches the screen bigger and homes in on the time stamp. 9.08 p.m., 14/01/2015. Two weeks back.
I say, ‘Rory told us he had to look up the nearest Tesco on his phone, Saturday night.’
‘He did. He also gave us the very definite impression that he’d never been to Stoneybatter before.’ On the screen, Rory scoops his change out of the checkout machine and glances around. For a second he looks straight into the camera. His eyes, blurred and wide and intent, stare like he can see me staring back. ‘But like I said, this is just the tip of the iceberg. We’ve got him within a few minutes’ walk of Aislinn’s house at least three other times this month. His car went past a camera on Manor Street last Thursday evening, he bought his Sunday paper in the corner shop on the eleventh of January, and he had a pint in Hanlon’s on the fifth.’
Rory squirming when we talked about his side trip to Tesco. I thought it was the timeline that was making him twitchy, but it was a lot more than that. Rory hadn’t needed to look up local shops on his phone. He already knew them by heart.
‘And that’s not counting the times Reilly didn’t spot, and the times that didn’t get caught on CCTV, and the times more than four weeks ago.’ Breslin takes his phone back. ‘Talk about “too full-on”,’ he says. ‘Rory’s been stalking Aislinn.’
I say, ‘Looks like it.’
‘He wasn’t bringing nutritious meals to Stoneybatter’s senior citizens. Anything innocent, he would’ve told us by now.’ He slides the phone into his pocket. ‘Now, wasn’t that worth sticking around for?’
‘I’m gonna have a chat with Reilly,’ I say. ‘Then I want to see the rest of that footage. Then I’ll pull Rory back in and I’ll see what he’s got to say.’
‘Why don’t we make that
we
. You and I, we’ll see what he’s got to say.’
‘I’m OK on my own. Thanks.’
Breslin’s eyebrows go up on that. ‘On your own? What about Moran?’
‘He’s out.’
‘Uh-huh,’ Breslin says. ‘You’re making him shake his trees by himself now, yeah? I thought your patience was wearing thin, all right.’
‘Moran’s well able to take care of business on his own. He doesn’t need me to hold his hand.’
Breslin’s scanning me, amused. He says, ‘I could’ve told you that you and Moran weren’t right for each other.’
I say, ‘I didn’t ask.’
‘Give that kid a dozen witnesses and a DNA match and a video of the murder going down, and he’d spend the next year making totally positively sure that the scumbag didn’t have a long-lost twin and the witnesses weren’t confused and no one spit in the DNA, just in case. I’m not knocking it; there are cases that need that approach. But you, on the other hand: you want to get stuff done.’
‘I do, yeah. That’s why I’m gonna go sort out Reilly and have a look at that footage, instead of having the chats about life in here. See you later.’
‘Jesus Christ, Conway, can you un-bunch your panties just for one minute? I’m
on your side
here. You keep acting like I’m the enemy. I don’t know where you got that idea, but I’d like to put it to bed.’
‘Breslin,’ I say. ‘I appreciate you showing me the footage, and all that shite. But I’m gonna assume anyone on this squad is the enemy, unless I’ve got stone-cold proof that he’s not. I’m pretty sure you can understand why.’
‘Oh, yeah,’ Breslin says. He cracks the door and checks the corridor: no one there. ‘I understand exactly why. In fact, I understand a lot better than you do. Do you want to know the story I heard about you?’
He thinks he sounds tempting. I say, ‘Why don’t you just assume it was all bollix, and we’ll go from there.’
‘I do assume it’s all bollix. But you still need to hear it.’
‘I’ve made it thirty-two years without giving a shite about other people’s bitching. I think I can manage a while longer.’
‘No. You can’t. Every time you walk into the squad room, when you think you’re just checking your e-mail and drinking coffee, this story is what the lads are hearing in their heads. As far as they’re concerned, this is who you are. And how’s that working out for you?’