Authors: Tana French
Rory takes the second of silence as disbelief. ‘I was
scared
! “Oh, by the way, Detective, I was spending half my evenings wandering around Stoneybatter peering in a woman’s window, and while I was at it I happened to notice another guy who might have been doing the same kind of thing, so you should really look at him . . .” I would have had to be
insane
to come out with that. Look what happened when you did find out.’
‘I get it,’ Steve says. ‘I do. And by the time that had come out, and you tried to mention this guy . . .’
‘No one was listening,’ I finish for him. ‘Yeah. I owe you an apology for that.’ Rory blinks, startled, and then comes up with a clumsy nod. ‘Lucky for us all Detective Moran picked up on it.’
‘Do you think you’d recognise the guy?’ Steve asks.
‘Yes. Almost definitely, yes. I’ve been thinking about him constantly, ever since I found out about Aislinn.’ Rory’s swaying forward eagerly; he’s our friend again. ‘The more I think about it, the more I think he . . . I mean, his face, Saturday night: something wasn’t right.’
Steve is pulling the photo array out of his bag. ‘OK,’ he says. ‘I want you to have a look at this and tell me if the man you saw is on here. If he’s not, say so. If you’re not sure, say so. Yeah?’
Rory nods, gearing up to concentrate. Steve hands him the card.
It takes Rory all of two seconds. ‘This guy. That’s him.’
His finger is on McCann.
‘Take your time,’ Steve says. ‘Make sure you’ve looked at all the faces.’
Rory does another scan because he’s a good boy, but his finger doesn’t move. ‘It’s him.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘Yes. I’m positive. He looks a bit younger here, but it’s him.’
And there it is: a solid link. No if-then-maybe; this is the real thing, at last. It shakes the air as it thuds down between me and Steve, dense and tarnish-black and too heavy to move. We’re stuck with it now.
Rory can feel us believing him. ‘Do you think he . . . ? Who is he?’
‘He’s a guy,’ Steve says. ‘We can’t go into details right now. Can you write down where you’ve seen the man, at the bottom there? Sign it and date it, and put your initials next to the photo you recognise.’
Rory leans the card on a shelf and writes carefully. ‘Here,’ he says, passing it back to Steve. ‘Is this OK?’
Steve reads. ‘That’s great. We’ll need you to come in and give an official statement, but not right now. You can relax.’
‘You mean . . . ? Do I still have to go in to you later on?’
‘I don’t know yet. We’ll see how the day goes. For now, just try and chill out a bit; get some kip, get some breakfast. I know that’s easier said.’
‘Am I still . . .’ Rory’s throat moves; he can’t get the word out. ‘Did you talk to Aislinn’s neighbours? Did any of them see me, in the . . . outside her place?’
‘Not yet. We’ll get back to you. Like I said: try and relax for now.’
‘Do you . . . you know. Do you still think I did this?’
Steve says, ‘I need to ask you, man. Is there anything else you’ve held back? Anything at all?’
Rory shakes his head vehemently. ‘No. That was it. I swear: there’s nothing.’
‘OK,’ Steve says. ‘If you think of anything else we should know, ring me straightaway. Meanwhile, all I can say is that we believe you saw this guy’ – I nod – ‘and we’re going to follow up on it very thoroughly. Yeah?’
‘Thanks,’ Rory says, confusedly, on a long breath out. ‘Thank you.’
I put my notebook away; Steve straightens the books that shifted when he leaned against them. ‘Um,’ Rory says, twisting his hands in the hem of that godawful jumper. ‘Can I say one thing?’
‘Sure,’ Steve says.
‘Me watching Aislinn. I know it sounds like . . . But remember when I said Aislinn didn’t mind being drawn into other people’s daydreams? And you didn’t believe me?’
He’s talking to me. ‘I remember you mentioning that, all right,’ I say.
‘When I watched her . . . I was trying to do the opposite of that. I was trying to feel what it was like to live there, be her. Trying to slip into that. Instead of doing it the other way round, like everyone else had.’
He’s wound himself into a tangle of jumper. ‘Does that . . . ? Does that make sense?’
It sounds like gold-plated self-justification bollix to me, but we need him on side, so I nod. ‘It does,’ Steve says gently. ‘We’ll keep it in mind.’
We leave Rory standing among his shelves, peering dazedly at us over the ranks of silhouetted badasses and spooky trees and women prancing in sundresses, like if we come back in a few hours they’ll have closed over his head and he’ll be gone.
Outside the door, I say, ‘What the hell was McCann at? Messing about in Stoneybatter weeks ago?’
‘Doing a recce, maybe,’ Steve says. ‘Getting the lie of the land, so that when it came time to do the job, he could get in and out without getting lost or getting spotted.’
‘Except he did get spotted. A bunch of times. That’s what Google Earth is for: so you can do your recce without getting your hands dirty.’
‘Yeah, but we can check what he’s been at on Google Earth. You can argue an ID; harder to argue with internet records.’
Deasy’s black Pajero is gone; two streetlamps down, there’s a white Nissan Qashqai that wasn’t there before. That was quick. I wonder if it’s Breslin in there, but I’m not about to check, not with Rory blinking behind the bookshop window. ‘Listen,’ I say, whipping around on Steve and pointing a finger in his face, ‘meet you in twenty minutes, in that park where we had breakfast Sunday. Make sure you’re not followed.’ I jab him in the shoulder. ‘Clear?’
‘Whatever,’ Steve says, rolling his eyes. ‘Jesus,’ and as I turn to stride off to my car, I see him throw his hands in the air in exasperation. Who knows whether it’ll fool Breslin, or his eyes and ears in the Qashqai. I get in my car and gun it like I’m well pissed off.
I’m first at the park, and I’m pretty sure there’s no one on my tail. The place is damp and near-deserted again, just a Lycra-wrapped cyclist stuffing down something depressing out of Tupperware and two nannies having what sounds like a bitching session in Portuguese while a clump of toddlers dig up a flowerbed. I pick the bench farthest from all of them and have a look through my notes on the Rory interview, while I wait for Steve.
The description that matches McCann. The times that give him anything up to an hour in Aislinn’s place. All in my handwriting, in my regulation notepad just like the ones packed with notes about the scumbags who danced on the other scumbag’s head and the rapist who strangled his victim with her own belt and all the rest of them.
Witness identified Det Joseph McCann.
I flip to a clean page and ring Sophie. It’s just gone half-eight, but she picks up on the second ring. ‘Hey. I was going to ring you as soon as I got to work.’
‘Hey,’ I say. ‘Does that mean you’ve got something?’
‘It means you’re on my shit list.’ She’s chewing and moving at the same time: breakfast standing up, while she throws her stuff together. Sophie’s running late. ‘Four o’clock this morning, my phone starts going apeshit: texts, e-mails, more texts, all from my computer guy. When I ignored them, because I’m
normal
, he started
ringing
me. The guy’s great at his job, but when it comes to being a human, he’s a total fucking incompetent. I finally had to turn off the phone. And so obviously the bloody alarm didn’t go off, and I woke up like ten seconds ago.’ Bang of a cupboard door.
‘Ah, shite,’ I say. ‘Sorry. Want to give me the computer guy’s number and I’ll ring him every half-hour for a week or two?’
That gets a snort of laughter out of Sophie. ‘If I thought he’d even notice, I’d say yeah. Listen, though: he got into your vic’s double-super-secret pics folder. That’s what he was doing till stupid o’clock. You were right: the password was “missingmymissingdaddy”, with a few substitutions thrown in for kicks.’
The shot of disgust catches me by surprise. It’s the first thing I’ve felt all day. ‘Brilliant,’ I say. ‘I love it when they’re predictable. What’s in there?’
Sophie slurps something. ‘I’ll forward you the stuff as soon as I get in the car. Basically, it’s a couple of dozen photos of Post-it notes with numbers and letters on them, plus one photo of a piece of paper with what looks like a kiddie fairy tale. I don’t know what you were hoping for, but this better be worth screwing up my day.’
‘I can’t tell till I see it,’ I say, ‘but it’s gotta be worth something if she bothered hiding it, right? Thanks a million, Sophie. Forward me the stuff – throw in the dates and times when the pics were taken, if you’ve got time. I promise to tell you it’s cracked the case wide open.’
‘You better. I have to go because I can’t find my other boot and I’m about to start smashing shit. See you ’round.’ And she hangs up.
I check the
Courier
online, in case I need to block out some time to go break Crowley’s face, but there’s nothing there about my personal life. Apparently even an arrogant fuck like last night’s knows when to back away. There’s another vomit-blast of Aislinn stuff – Crowley’s tracked down some old classmate to make generic sobbing noises about what a lovely girl Aislinn was; Lucy, good woman, must have told him to get stuffed. And there’s a sidebar of unsolved murders from the last couple of years – for a second I think
The gaffer’s gonna love that,
before I remember that by the end of the day this article is gonna be the least of O’Kelly’s problems. I can’t even start imagining what he’ll think of me by then. It bugs me that that even occurs to me. O’Kelly’s opinion isn’t gonna play a big role in my future, but some base-of-the-skull part of my brain hasn’t caught up with that yet.
Just for kicks, I experiment with wondering what last night’s smug fucker will think when – if – he sees my name at the heart of the story on every front page. I try it delicately at first, like biting down on a broken tooth you’ve been avoiding for a long time. It takes me a minute to figure out I’m feeling nothing. I bite harder, wonder whether he’ll be proud of me for taking down the bad guy, impressed with all the work I put into it, disappointed at what this’ll do to my career, disgusted with me for ratting out my own: turns out I don’t care. I go meta, try to resent that he left it too late even to let me have a reaction: nothing. All I feel is stupid, for wasting brain space on this shite. When I ring my ma this evening, I’m gonna dig up some old rubber-hamster story from Missing Persons, make her laugh, and say not one word about last night.
Steve comes through the park gate talking into his phone and looking around for me – the nannies give him the once-over, then go back to their conversation when they see me lifting a hand to him. He drops onto the bench beside me, shoving his phone into his pocket.
‘Story?’ I say.
‘I left a message for my guy at the mobile company, the one who’s tracking down full records on the phone that called in the attack to Stoneybatter. I’m hoping there’s something on there to help us prove it’s Breslin’s phone. We should be so lucky, but . . .’ The corner of his mouth twists down. ‘Any news?’
‘Sophie’s guy got into Aislinn’s password-protected folder. She says it’s mostly numbers on Post-its; she’s gonna e-mail me the pics now.’
Steve’s face crunches into a quick grimace. ‘Ah, shite. Shite. We needed that to be something good.’
‘It still could be. Who’s the pessimist now?’
‘’Cause Rory’s ID . . . it won’t be worth a lot. Any defence barrister’s going to say Rory had passed McCann in the corridor at HQ, on his way in or out, so he knew his face from there and got mixed up.’
‘Yep,’ I say. ‘Or he didn’t just get mixed up: he was frantically trying to invent a fall guy, so he pictured someone he’d seen recently, to make the description sound realistic.’
‘Yeah.’ Steve hasn’t moved since he sat down, not even to resettle his arse on the damp bench. He’s concentrating hard. ‘We need to try for a voice ID, off the uniform who took the call.’
‘While you’re with Breslin this morning, see if you can get a voice sample. Just record a minute of the conversation on your phone. Then send it to me, if you can’t get away from him, and I’ll take it down to Stoneybatter.’
He nods. My phone beeps. ‘Here we go,’ I say, pulling it out. ‘Keep your fingers crossed.’
‘They are. Believe me.’
The e-mail says
Here
, and a list of dates and times. It has twenty-nine pics attached. I swipe through them: yellow Post-it,
8W
inside a circle. Post-it,
1030
inside a circle. Post-it,
7
inside a circle, in the background a sliver of purple that looks like Aislinn’s sitting-room curtains. Post-it,
7Th
inside a circle, chunk of a thumb in one corner.
I say, ‘Times and days.’
‘Looks like.’
‘Remember we were wondering how the secret boyfriend could’ve made appointments with Aislinn?’
Steve flicks the edge of my phone with one fingernail. ‘Low-tech. The safest way.’
‘And we didn’t find any of these in the search of her gaff.’ I keep swiping:
11
,
6M
,
745
. ‘When Breslin knows he’s got some free time coming up, he sticks a note through Aislinn’s letterbox, letting her know what time she needs to be ready and waiting in her good lingerie. Then, when he gets there, he takes the note back and destroys it. Just like we said: he’s careful.’