Broken Harbour

I said, “You do that. Just stay out of my way.” I shoved the evidence bag into my pocket and left him there.

* * *

I went up to the top floor, shut myself in a cubicle in the gents’ and leaned my forehead against the clammy plastic of the door. My mind had turned slippery and treacherous as black ice, I couldn’t get purchase; every thought seemed to send me lurching through into freezing water, grabbing for solid ground and finding nothing. When my hands finally stopped shaking, I opened the door and went downstairs to the incident room.

It was overheated and buzzing, floaters taking calls, updating the whiteboard, drinking coffee and laughing at a dirty joke and having some kind of debate about blood-spatter patterns. All the energy made me dizzy. I picked my way through it feeling like my legs might go at any second.

Richie was at his desk, shirtsleeves rolled up, messing around with report sheets and not seeing them. I threw my sodden coat over the back of my chair, leaned over to him and said quietly, “We’re going to collect a few pieces of paper each and leave the room, like we’re in a hurry, but without making a big deal of it. Let’s go.”

He stared for a second. His eyes were bloodshot; he looked like shit. Then he nodded, picked up a handful of reports and pushed back his chair.

There’s an interview room, down at the far end of the top-floor corridor, that we never use unless we have to. The heating doesn’t work-even in the heart of summer the room feels chilled, subterranean-and something wrong with the wiring means that the strip lights give off a raw, eye-splitting blaze and burn out every week or two. We went there.

Richie closed the door behind us. He stayed beside it, sheaf of pointless paper hanging forgotten from one hand, eyes skittery as a corner boy’s. That was what he looked like: some malnourished scumbag hunched against a graffitied wall, standing lookout for small-time dealers in exchange for a fix. I had been beginning to think of this man as my partner. His skinny shoulder braced against mine had begun to feel like something that belonged. The feeling had been a good one, a warm one. Both of us made me sick.

I took the evidence bag out of my pocket and put it down on the table.

Richie bit down on both his lips, but he didn’t flinch or startle. The last scatter of hope blew out of me. He had been expecting this.

The silence went on forever. Probably Richie thought I was using it to bear down on him, the way I would have with a suspect. I felt as if the air of the room had turned crystalline, brittle, and when I spoke it would shatter into a million razor-edged shards and rain down on our heads, slice us both to rags.

Finally I said, “A woman handed it in this morning. The description matches my sister.”

That hit Richie. His head snapped up and he stared at me, sick-faced and forgetting to breathe. I said, “I’d like to know how the fuck she got her hands on this.”

“Your sister?”

“The woman you saw waiting for me outside here, on Tuesday night.”

“I didn’t know she was your sister. You never said.”

“And I didn’t know it was any of your business. How did she get hold of this?”

Richie slumped back against the door and ran a hand across his mouth. “She showed up at my gaff,” he said, without looking at me. “Last night.”

“How did she know where you live?”

“I don’t know. I walked home, yesterday-I needed a chance to think.” A glance-a quick one, like it hurt-at the table. “I figure she must’ve been waiting outside here again, either for me or for you. She must’ve seen me come out, followed me home. I was only in the door five minutes when I heard the bell.”

“And you invited her in for a cup of tea and a nice chat? Is that what you normally do when strange women show up at your door?”

“She asked could she come in. She was freezing; I could see her shivering. And she wasn’t some randomer. I remembered her, from Tuesday night.” Of course he had. Men, in particular, don’t forget Dina in a hurry. “I wasn’t going to let a mate of yours freeze on my doorstep.”

“You’re a real saint. It didn’t occur to you to, I don’t know, ring me and tell me she was there?”

“It did occur to me. I was going to. But she was… she wasn’t in great shape, man. She was holding on to my arm and going, over and over, ‘Don’t tell Mikey I’m here, don’t you dare tell Mikey, he’ll freak out…’ I would’ve done it anyway, only she didn’t give me a chance. Even when I went to the jacks, she made me leave my phone with her-and my flatmates were down the pub, it wasn’t like I could drop them a hint or get her talking to one of them while I texted you. In the end I thought, no harm done, she’s somewhere safe for the night, you and me could talk in the morning.”

“‘No harm done,’” I said. “Is that what you call this?”

A short, twisting silence. I said, “What did she want?”

Richie said, “She was worried about you.”

I laughed loud enough to startle both of us. “Oh, she was, was she? That’s a fucking riot. I think you know Dina well enough at this stage to have spotted that, if anyone needs worrying about, it’s her. You’re a detective, chum. That means you’re supposed to notice the bleeding obvious. My sister is as mad as a hatter. She’s five beers short of a six-pack. She’s up the wall and swinging from the chandelier. Please don’t tell me you missed that.”

“She didn’t seem crazy to me. Upset, yeah, up to ninety, but that was because she was worried about you. Properly worried, like. Freaking-out worried.”

“That’s exactly what I’m talking about. That is crazy. Worried about what?”

“This case. What it was doing to you. She said-”

“The only thing Dina knows about this case is that it exists. That’s it. And even that was enough to send her off the fucking deep end.” I never tell anyone that Dina is crazy. People have raised the possibility to me before, on occasion; none of them made that mistake twice. “Do you want to know how I spent Tuesday night? Listening to her rave about how she couldn’t sleep in her flat because her shower curtain was ticking like a grandfather clock. Want to know how I spent Wednesday evening? Trying to convince her not to set fire to the heap of paper that she had left of my books.”

Richie shifted, uneasily, against the door. “I don’t know about any of that. She wasn’t like that at my place.”

Something in my stomach clamped tight. “Of course she bloody well wasn’t. She knew you’d be on the phone to me in a heartbeat, and that didn’t suit her plans. She’s crazy, not stupid. And she’s got some serious willpower, when she feels like it.”

“She said she’d been over at yours the last few nights, talking to you, and the case had your head melted. She…” He glanced at me. He was picking his words carefully. “She said you weren’t OK. She said you’d always been good to her, never once been anything but gentle, even when she didn’t deserve it-that’s what she said-but the other night she startled you, when she showed up, and you pulled your gun. She said she left because you told her she should kill herself.”

“And you believed that.”

“I figured she was exaggerating. But still… She wasn’t making it up about you being stressed, man. She said you were coming apart, this case was taking you apart, and there was no way you’d put it down.”

I couldn’t tell, through all this dark snarled mess, whether this was Dina’s revenge for something real or imaginary that I had done to her, or whether she had seen something I had missed, something that had sent her banging on Richie’s door like a panicked bird beating against a window. I couldn’t tell, either, which one would be worse.

“She said to me, ‘You’re his partner, he trusts you. You have to look after him. He won’t let me, he won’t let his family, maybe he might let you.’”

I said, “Did you sleep with her?”

I had been trying not to ask. The fraction of silence, after Richie opened his mouth, told me everything I needed to know. I said, “Don’t bother answering that.”