Authors: Tana French
Rory gives up. He stares into space, rocking a little with fatigue.
‘One.’
Slowly the lines of Rory’s face solidify. He stops swaying. Inside his mind, things are moving.
Breslin’s made the wrong call. I know what he’s at – he’s hoping the forced silence and the fear will bear down on Rory hard enough to crack him – but it’s the barrage of words and demands that was doing the job. Locking this guy into his own head is only giving him a chance to get his focus back and straighten out his stories. We’re losing him.
‘Two.’
‘Forget it,’ I say, bringing my hands down on the table with a bang. ‘That’s as much time as he’s getting. Rory: look at me.’ I snap my fingers in his face. He blinks. ‘Why’d you turn that cooker off?’
Too late. Rory says, ‘I didn’t. I’ve never been inside Aislinn’s house. I never hurt Aislinn in any way. And I want to go home.’
He stands up, wobbly-legged, and starts trying to pull his coat off the back of his chair. His hands are shaking; he keeps losing hold.
‘Whoa there,’ Breslin says. ‘We’re not done. Sit down.’
‘I’m done. Am I under arrest?’
I can see Breslin opening his mouth on the words. ‘No,’ I say, and ignore his head coming round towards me. ‘Not at the moment. But if you want us to believe your story, walking out on us isn’t the way to go about it. You need to stay here and work with us.’
‘No. If I’m not under arrest, I’m going home.’ Rory manages to get his coat off the chair and drops it.
‘Here’s what we’ll do,’ I say, closing my notebook. ‘You go home. Get some sleep. We’ll talk to Aislinn’s neighbours and see if any of them happened to look out their back windows and see you in the laneway between, say, 8.30 and 8.40. If they did, you’re off the hook: you wouldn’t have had time for the other thing.’ Obviously we’ve already talked to the neighbours, and I’m betting they would have mentioned some weirdo hanging around the laneway, but this doesn’t seem to occur to Rory. ‘Come back in to us tomorrow to sign your statement, and we’ll do updates then. Fair enough?’
Rory pulls his coat around his shoulders, not even trying the sleeves. ‘Yes. OK.’
‘We’ll come pick you up,’ Breslin says, keeping it just the right side of a threat. He stands up and stretches. ‘You’re not planning to be anywhere other than your flat or the bookshop, are you?’
‘No. I’m going nowhere.’
‘Good plan,’ Breslin tells him. He pulls the door open and sweeps his hand at it with a little mock bow. ‘After you.’
Steve is in the doorway of the observation room, suit jacket over his arm, sleeves rolled up against the heat. His eyes meet mine for a long level second. Then we’re past him and down the corridor, Rory speeding up towards the draught of cold fresh air coming up the stairwell, Breslin humming happily to himself under his breath.
Me and Breslin watch from the doorway as Rory heads off across the cobblestones. He looks small and messy, slams of wind flapping his coat and tangling in his hair, swerving him off course. It’s practically dark. Just a couple of months of bodyguard work, and I’ll have enough saved up for a holiday somewhere blazing hot in eye-shattering colours and very far away.
‘Enlighten me,’ Breslin says pleasantly. ‘Why is this guy going home?’
I say, ‘We’re nearly there with him. He was right on the edge, till that pause gave him a chance to pull his head together – and if we could get him there once, we can get him there again. But if we put him under arrest, he’s gonna get a solicitor in there, and we can say goodbye to any chance of a confession.’
‘We don’t
need
a confession, Conway. We’ve got enough circumstantial stuff to bury him alive.’
Which is probably true. I don’t care. My last murder case: this one isn’t gonna be tacked down with circumstantial this and reasonable inference that. I’m gonna hammer a stake right through its heart and leave it dead as dirt.
‘I want one,’ I say. ‘We can afford to leave Rory till tomorrow.’
‘Unless he jumps in the Liffey.’
‘He won’t. He still thinks I might wind up believing him. He wants that.’
Breslin watches me. ‘Is he right?’
‘No,’ I say. The adrenaline buzz is ebbing fast; I can feel the post-interrogation crash getting ready to hit. It leaves a sucking empty spot that, if you’re not careful, can feel like loss. I need caffeine, sugar, a dirty great burger. ‘He’s our man, all right.’
‘He is. And I hope you know that cooker doesn’t actually turn it into manslaughter, either. There’s no chance that little pussy-boy was thinking straight enough, after
killing
someone, to worry about burning the house down. His brain was
juice
. He probably turned the cooker off because the food was starting to burn and the smell bothered him. Cooper’s report still stands: could be manslaughter,
if
Rory managed to get up the strength for a serious punch, or he could’ve deliberately smashed her skull in when she was down. And the more I look at those pathetic excuses for muscles . . .’
‘Not my problem,’ I say. ‘The lawyers and the jury can figure that one out. All I want is a watertight case that he killed her.’
‘Well,’ Breslin says, heartily enough that for a second there I think he’s going to clap me on the back, ‘that shouldn’t be a problem to us. We’ll get every warm body out there looking for backup evidence, we’ll throw the lot at Rory, and he’ll fold like a cheap lawn chair. And if he doesn’t, hey, we’ll have enough circumstantial stuff to make our case watertight anyway. Right?’
‘Right,’ I say. Rory is gone, around the corner towards the gate. The splatter of yellow light on the empty cobblestones makes them look slick from hard rain, dangerous.
Wheels turning in Breslin’s mind, so heavy I can practically hear them. I keep my eyes on the place where Rory was until, finally, I feel Breslin move away and hear the door close behind him.
I ring Lucy from the women’s jacks. This time she answers, but her voice is barely above a whisper and she sounds hassled; someone in the background is calling orders and there’s a sudden blast of country music, cut off by an annoyed shout. The theatre has a new show opening that evening, they’re having technical problems and Lucy really has to go (in the background: ‘Luce! Any word on those parcans?’). She swears she’ll be home all tomorrow, but I can’t tell whether it’s true or whether she’s just saying whatever will get rid of me.
I’m gonna be banging on her door tomorrow morning before she’s anywhere near hauling her hangover out of bed. I hope she tells me she made up Aislinn’s secret boyfriend to make sure the investigation was good and thorough. I hope that, as I step out of Lucy’s flat, Sophie rings me to tell me that Aislinn’s password-protected computer folder turned out to be full of pictures of Daddy, scanned to make them handier for sobbing over.
Me, praying my most interesting leads will crash and burn. It feels against nature, like some parasite has slid into my head and is eating bits of my brain. But Lucy, and that folder: they’re the last two stubborn unruly strands stopping me from tying everything into a neat bow, leaving it outside the door of O’Kelly’s office with my badge on top, and walking away.
Steve is at our desk, checking e-mails. I sit down next to him and start flicking through the piles of paper that materialised while I was away. The floaters try not to let me catch them glancing over, wondering when the mad bitch is gonna lose it again.
The thick sheet of silence between me and Steve is growing edges like ripped tin. I say, ‘So you saw Rory in there.’
‘A fair bit of it,’ Steve says, without looking up. ‘Good interview.’
It doesn’t sound like a compliment. ‘Thanks,’ I say. I catch Breslin’s knowing eye on us:
You were never right for each other.
‘Where were you?’
‘I ran the mug books past the barman and Aislinn’s neighbours. No hits.’ He waits for me to say
I told you so
. When I don’t: ‘Then I went and had chats with a few of the lads who worked the Des Murray disappearance – don’t worry, I was subtle about it.’
‘I’m not worried.’
Steve throws me a quick sideways glance, trying to work out how I mean that. ‘Anyway,’ he says, after a second. The tone to his voice, neutral, precise, arm’s-length; I’ve heard it before, but to defence solicitors and slippery journalists, never to me. ‘According to them, McCann had a bit of a thing for Evelyn Murray, all right. He was the one who pushed to keep the investigation going; he got very eloquent about this poor fragile woman with her life in ruins – and McCann isn’t the eloquent type, so the lads remembered it. He even found her someone to buy Des’s taxi plate, and made sure she got top dollar for it, so she and Aislinn weren’t stuck for cash. But the lads are all positive it never went as far as an affair. Even back then, McCann was getting called Holy Joe; not a chance he was riding a subject’s missus. They laughed at me for even thinking it.’
Another gap for my
I told you so
. I can’t take any longer sitting there next to him, being polite to each other under Breslin’s amused eye. I say, ‘Did you find a reason to think any of this has anything to do with our case?’
‘No.’
‘Good. Then let’s get this meeting done.’
I stand up. Even before I reach the front of the desk, the floaters have dropped their work and are sitting up straight, managing to be all attention without God forbid making eye contact with the rabid animal.
‘OK,’ I say, ‘good news. It’s looking pretty definite that Rory Fallon is our boy. He and the CCTV both say he’s been stalking Aislinn for at least a month. That’s how he spent the missing time before their date on Saturday night – or part of it, anyway: peeping in her windows.’
‘Little perv,’ Stanton says, grinning. ‘Better swab her walls for DNA.’
A quick edgy smatter of laughs. ‘Do it,’ I say. Rory’s leftovers might not prove murder, but they’ll up our chances at trial; juries hate a wanker. ‘He says he was hanging out in the laneway behind her patio, so get the techs to give that wall a good going-over – and try the wall under her kitchen window, too, just in case he got up the guts for a little close-range action.’
Stanton nods; Meehan puts it in the book of jobs. I say, ‘Our new working theory is that, when Rory arrived in Aislinn’s house, she somehow found out about the stalking. She told him to get out, and he lost the head.’
‘Rory hasn’t spilled the beans yet,’ Breslin says, ‘but he’s come close. We’re hoping tomorrow’s the day.’
‘Before we pull him back in,’ I say, ‘let’s find out just how much stalking he did, and what kind. I need two guys walking Rory’s picture around Stoneybatter to see if anyone recognises him from the last couple of months. He’s got the bookshop to run, so we’re mainly looking at evenings and Sundays. Try everywhere: houses, shops, pubs, offices where the workers might’ve crossed paths with him on their way out. Any community groups or bingo nights or sports clubs, track down the members.’ Kellegher lifts a finger. ‘Kellegher, you and Gaffney take that. And I want to know what Rory’s phone’s been doing over the last two months: when it pinged towers around Stoneybatter, whether it logged onto any wireless networks in the area. Stanton, while you’re making calls, make those.’
The case has changed. Before, we were dragnetting, sifting through what came up and hoping there was something good in there. Now we’re hunting. We’ve got the prey in our sights and we’re closing in, and everything we do is building towards the moment when we’ll have him pinned down for the kill shot.
That feeling, it’s not some bullshit figure of speech. It lives inside you somewhere deeper and older and more real than anything else except sex, and when it comes rising it takes your whole body for its own. It’s a smell of blood raging at the back of your nose, it’s your arm muscle throbbing to let go the bowstring, it’s drums speeding in your ears and a victory roar building at the bottom of your gut. I let myself love that feeling, one last time. I let myself drink it down, cram every second of it deep into me, lay away my store of it to last me the rest of my life.
‘I want to know where Rory drinks,’ I say, ‘and what the barman and the regulars think of him – if he’s got a rep for fixating on some girl, not taking no for an answer, if he’s got a temper, anything that could be relevant.’ Meehan’s hand is up. ‘Meehan, have that; it’ll give you a change of scenery from Stoneybatter. And I want to know what the other Ranelagh businesses think of Rory. Whether anyone’s got any stories about him coming on a little strong to a customer in the bookshop, or hanging about outside the bakery waiting for the pretty one to finish her shift.’
‘I’ll do that,’ Breslin says. ‘Moran, fancy joining me?’
Steve looks up, startled, but Breslin gives him a bland smile and after a second he says, ‘Yeah. Sure.’
‘Great,’ Breslin says, throwing him a wink. ‘Let’s take this bad boy down.’
I don’t feel like going into my plans for tomorrow. ‘I’ll check in with the Bureau first thing in the morning,’ I say, ‘see if they’ve got anywhere with fibre matches and DNA.’ And with Aislinn’s computer folder, which I also don’t feel like mentioning. ‘Meanwhile, someone needs to stay on Rory’s gaff – just for tonight and part of tomorrow, till we’re ready to bring him back in.’ Breslin gives me an amused glance. I don’t actually think Rory’s gonna throw himself in the Liffey, or skip town, or ditch evidence we haven’t spotted, but I’m not gonna risk it for the sake of a few hours’ surveillance. ‘Deasy: do that, or stick a couple of uniforms on it if you want, but tell them they need plainclothes and an unmarked car.’