Authors: Tana French
Steve reaches over and enlarges the
745
on my screen. ‘You figure that matches Breslin’s writing?’
‘Hard to tell. There’s nothing that clashes, anyway. And I’ve seen him write times like that, without the full stop.’
‘Plenty of cops do that.’
‘Yeah, but not a lot of civilians. That might narrow it down.’
‘Even then . . .’ Steve shakes his head. ‘A handwriting expert’s not going to give us a match on this much.’
‘No way,’ I say. I go back to swiping:
9F
,
630W
,
7
. ‘And Breslin would know that. Again: not taking any chances.’
‘No way he was planning on killing Aislinn from the start.’
‘No, but he wasn’t planning on leaving his wife for her, either. Breslin likes his life. He likes his kids. He likes his house, and his car, and his fancy sun holidays. Probably he even likes his wife, more or less. He liked Aislinn, too, but not enough to risk losing all the rest of it. If she went bunny-boiler on him, he didn’t want her having any evidence she could show his wife.’
‘He did a good job.’ Steve doesn’t look happy about it.
7
,
745Th
,
8
, and then: a plain sheet of white paper. Careful, even handwriting – not Breslin’s; this looks like a match to the signatures and scribbles on Aislinn’s paperwork. Every loop neatly rounded, every line so straight that she must have put a lined sheet underneath to guide her, keep it perfect. I screen-pinch it bigger and we read, me glancing at Steve for a nod when I’m ready to scroll down.
Once upon a time two girls lived in a cottage in the deep dark forest. Their names were Carabossa and Meladina.
Carabossa ran barefoot in the forest all day and all night. She climbed the tallest trees. She swam in the streams. She trained wolf cubs to eat from her hand. She shot bears with her bow and arrow.
Meladina never left the cottage, because a wizard had put a spell on her. Carabossa couldn’t break the spell. No prince could break it. No good witch or wizard could break it. Meladina thought she would be trapped there forever. She looked out the cottage window and cried.
Then one day Meladina found a spell book buried under the floor of the cottage. She started to teach herself magic. Carabossa warned her that the wizard was dangerous, and she should have nothing to do with him, but Meladina had no choice. It was that or die in the cottage.
When she had learned enough, Meladina worked her magic and moved the spell from herself onto the wizard. He was trapped in the cottage forever, and Meladina ran out to climb trees and swim in streams with Carabossa. And they lived happily ever after.
If I got the ending wrong, I need you to tell them. Love and more love.
‘What the hell?’ Steve says.
I say, ‘That’s meant for Lucy.’
‘Yeah, I get that part. But what’s it mean? Like, Aislinn fell in love with Breslin – OK, that’s the spell – and it kept her trapped. And then what? She got him to fall in love with her too? Or what?’
‘I don’t care. Lucy can explain all the cutesy fairy tale crap. Because that’s what this end part means: if shit goes wrong, Lucy needs to tell us – or whoever – the whole story. And it means Aislinn was scared. As far back as’ – I tap at the phone, going back to Sophie’s e-mail – ‘as far back as the twelfth of November, Aislinn was scared things could end exactly like this. She made her will right around then, remember?’
‘Too scared to leave him,’ Steve says, trying it out. ‘And that’s the spell?’
‘Scared he was going through her laptop, too, or she wouldn’t have bothered with the password – not on something she wanted found. Sounds like a lovely romance all round.’ I’m checking the dates on the note pics, too, while I’m at it. Ninth of September, 5.51pm. Fifteenth of September, 6.08pm. Eighteenth of September, 6.14pm. Aislinn getting home from work, finding a note, taking a photo, uploading it onto her computer and deleting it off her phone. Planning something.
‘And her reversing the spell on him is her trapping him, somehow. Getting him locked up, maybe?’ Steve has his eyebrows pulled together and his hands clasped on top of his head, thinking it through. ‘The whole Rory thing was Aislinn trying to provoke Breslin into beating the shite out of her, so he’d go to prison, because that was the only way she could think of to get rid of him? Except she didn’t think things would go this far?’
I consider that. It fits with what we know about Aislinn: naïve enough to think an idiot plan like that could actually work, just because it played so nicely in her head; spent such a big chunk of her life trapped by someone else’s demands, she could have panicked when it happened again. ‘It’d explain why Aislinn kept pics of the notes. Evidence of the affair, in case Breslin tried to claim he’d never seen her in his life.’
‘Except why just the notes? Why not, I don’t know, set her phone to voice-record a conversation? Or take photos of him naked in her bed when he crashed out?’
I could’ve gone my whole life without that mental image. The things this job puts you through. ‘Scared he’d catch her at it,’ I say. ‘Or go through her phone before she could upload the file and delete it.’
‘Dammit,’ Steve says. ‘Even one nude pic would’ve been hard evidence. This stuff . . .’ He blows out a breath. ‘Unless Lucy’s got something amazing up her sleeve, we’ll be lucky if we ever have enough for a charge. Never mind a conviction.’
He’s watching the kids put dirt in their hair, with his hands clasped between his knees. The tense hunch of his spine says he’s not happy.
I say, ‘You don’t need to do this.’
It needs saying. Last night, with me and Steve caught up in our adrenaline hurricane from the hunt and the realisation, I took it for granted we were in this together, all the way to the finish line. I think he did too. Today, with Steve dumping doom and gloom into this morning made of flat chilly sky and Deasy’s watchful eyes and leftover rain dripping inside the park hedges, it feels like he should have a chance to change his mind.
His face turns towards me. Not blank; he’s not trying to pretend the thought’s never crossed his mind. Complicated.
He says, ‘Neither do you.’
‘I don’t have a lot to lose here. You do. And it’s my case.’ It gives me a quick flash of something like pain, the fact that part of me can’t stop thinking like a detective: my case, my responsibility. It’ll wear off, somewhere down the line. ‘You can throw a sickie. Get food poisoning. Go home, come back in a couple of days when the dust’s settled.’
‘We could both still get out of it. Tell Breslin that Rory’s ID’d McCann as being on the scene, and we know McCann’s not involved but we don’t want to fuck him up by letting him get dragged into court as an alternative theory of the crime, so we’re going to back off Rory and mark this one unsolved. Then tell Rory the ID didn’t go anywhere. The gaffer’ll give us a bit of shite for not getting the solve, but Breslin’ll put in a good word for us. Bang: we’re done. Like the whole thing never happened.’
He’s watching me, and his face has that same immobility it took on last night. The scraping light finds crow’s-feet and smile-lines I never noticed before. I can’t tell whether he wants me to say yes; yes, let’s flush this toxic godawful mess and walk away.
He’s right: we could do it. We could even square it with our consciences, near enough. Like he said, we’ll get a conviction around the same time we get a Lotto win. Even if we do, justice does nothing for the dead; nothing we do will make any difference to Aislinn. There’s no family needing answers, not this time. And it’s not like McCann and Breslin are going to turn into a rampaging serial-killer team if we don’t take them down; they’ll go back to being who they always were, and Breslin will go back to keeping it in his pants. No harm done, all round.
Except that, when you get down to it, I’m right where I thought I was when we figured Breslin and McCann were bent. If I keep my mouth shut, then they’ve put their hands on me and knotted me into someone else, living a whole different life, even if from outside it looks just like the old one. Breslin and McCann will be running me and my every day after all, whether they even wanted to or not.
I owe this case. I’ve got beef with this case. I need to shoot it right between the eyes, skin it and stuff it and mount it on my wall, for when my grandkids ask me to tell them stories about way back a million years ago when I used to be a D.
I can’t make myself tell Steve I’m gone, not yet. ‘Nah,’ I say. ‘I’ve started now; might as well finish.’
The sudden loosening in his face could be anything, relief or disappointment, till it resolves itself into a small, very sweet smile. ‘I might as well come along for the ride, so,’ he says. ‘I’ve never had food poisoning; I’d only make a bollix of faking it.’
For some reason that gets me, solid in the gut. Not like I’m welling up, or any of that shite, but something swells hard under my ribs. Weird how, when I realised I’m leaving, it never occurred to me that that’s gonna mean leaving Steve. Somewhere along the way I must’ve started taking the little bollix for granted, thinking he’d always be there, like a brother. I don’t do that shite. Because the fact is, Steve won’t always be there. Once I’m gone, we’ll stay in touch for a while. We’ll go for the odd pint, laugh too hard at each other’s stories and have conversations full of awkward stumbles where he tries to talk tactfully around work and his new partner, and I try to get him to knock that shit off. Then the pints will get further apart, and then one of us will get into a relationship and won’t be around as much; the texts will start with ‘Hey, too long no see,’ and all of a sudden we’ll realise it’s been a year since we met up. And that’ll be, in every way that counts, the end of that.
I can’t afford to be getting maudlin. ‘You little goody-goody,’ I say. ‘I bet you never once mitched off school, did you?’
‘Ah, I did. To visit my dying granny.’
I concentrate on the kids eating flowerbed, and the cyclist doing improbable stretches to show off his glutes to the nannies, till I can wipe my mind blank again. ‘OK,’ I say. ‘Good. In that case, I’m gonna go show Aislinn’s fairy tale to Lucy. You go play with Breslin. Tell him you and me called in to Rory – he’s gonna hear anyway. Say I was giving Rory hassle about his exes saying he was too full-on; I was asking if he stalked them too, he denied it, the poor guy got all upset. Play it like you’re still not totally sold on Rory, I’m still pissed off with you for having doubts, and you’re still pissed off with me for dissing them. That way Breslin’ll want to keep you close, and he won’t be too worried about me going MIA for an hour.’
Steve’s nodding, thinking it through. ‘All sounds good. If he asks where you’ve gone . . . ?’
‘You don’t know. I told you it was none of your business.’
After a moment Steve asks, ‘When do we pull the pin?’
‘Today,’ I say. ‘It has to be. Breslin’s expecting to haul Rory in later on, arrest him and start preparing the file for the prosecutors. If I don’t do that, he’s gonna start wondering why not, and then they’ll be on guard.’
He nods. ‘Who do we go for? Breslin or McCann?’
‘I vote McCann. Unless Lucy comes out with something top-notch that we can use on Breslin. Breslin’s been watching us for days now; he’s got a lot better handle on us than McCann does. Plus, if we even hint any of this to Breslin, he’s gonna throw the mother of all self-righteous tantrums, and I’ve had enough of those for one week. We’ll find a way to get him out of our hair for a while, and we’ll tackle McCann.’
‘OK,’ Steve says, at the end of a long breath. ‘OK. McCann.’
‘And you’d better get moving, before Breslin starts wondering where you are.’
‘Right.’ He pulls the photo arrays out of his case and hands me a couple of each. ‘Good luck.’
‘Yeah,’ I say. ‘You too.’
For some reason me and Steve slap hands as we’re leaving. We don’t normally do that shite, what with not being sixteen, but it feels like we need something, on our way into this.
Chapter 15
This time Lucy answers the buzzer fast. When she opens the front door, she’s dressed – black combats and a hoodie again, but clean ones, and she’s got Docs on. She looks at me, expressionless, and waits.
‘Morning,’ I say. ‘Are you OK to talk for a while, or is this too early?’
She says, ‘I figured you’d be earlier.’ Then she turns and heads back up the stairs.
Her sitting room is cold, the uncompromising damp cold after a night with the heat off. It smells of toast, smoke – the legal kind this time – and coffee. The stuffed fox and the old phones and the coil of cable are gone; instead there’s a record player and a stack of beat-up albums, a big cardboard box of flowery crockery, and a roll of canvas that touches the ceiling, coming unrolled to show a painted country lane disappearing into the distance. The room feels charged up with too many stories, jostling in the corners, pushing for space.
Lucy sits down first this time, grabbing the sofa with its back to the window and leaving me the one that takes the light – she learns fast. She’s got her armoury lined up ready on the coffee table: pack of smokes, lighter, ashtray, mug of coffee. She doesn’t offer me any. She sits still and watches me, braced for my first move.