I stood up, bracing myself against the wall like an old man. Fiona buttoned her coat, wrapped the scarf around her neck and tugged it tight. The child had stopped crying. We stood there in the corridor for a moment, listening by Jenny’s door for a call, a movement, anything that would keep us there, but nothing came.
For the rest of my life I will remember that journey. It was the last moment when I could have turned back: picked up Jenny’s bits and pieces, told Fiona I had spotted a flaw in my grand plan, dropped her back at the hospital and said good-bye. On the way to Broken Harbor that day, I was what I had given all my adult life to becoming: a murder detective, the finest on the squad, the one who got the solves and got them on the straight and narrow. By the time I left, I was something else.
Fiona huddled against the passenger door, staring out the window. When we got onto the motorway I took one hand off the wheel, found my notebook and pen and passed them to her. She balanced the notebook on her knee and I kept my speed steady while she wrote. When she was done she passed them back to me. I took a quick glance at the page: her handwriting was clear and rounded, with fast little flourishes on the tails.
Fiona said, “She’ll need clothes to leave the hospital in. Wherever she’s going next.”
“Thanks,” I said.
“I can’t believe I’m doing this.”
“I’m putting her in prison.”
“You’re doing the best you can. That’s all any of us can do.”
She said suddenly, as if the words had forced their way out, “When we were kids I used to pray that Jenny would do something awful. I was always in trouble-nothing major, I wasn’t some delinquent, just little stuff like giving my mum cheek or talking in class. Jenny never did anything bad, ever. She wasn’t a goody-goody; it just came natural to her. I used to pray she’d do something really terrible, just once. Then I would tell and she’d get in trouble, and everyone would be like, ‘Well done, Fiona. You did the right thing. Good girl.’”
She had her hands clasped together in her lap, tightly, like a child at confession. I said, “Don’t tell that story again, Ms. Rafferty.”
My voice came out sharper than I meant it to. Fiona went back to staring out the window. “I wouldn’t.”
After that we didn’t talk. As I turned into Ocean View a man swung out from a side road, running hard; I slammed on the brakes, but it was a jogger, eyes staring and unseeing, nostrils flaring like a runaway horse’s. For a second I thought I heard the great gasps of his breath, through the glass; then he was gone. He was the only person we saw. The wind coming off the sea shook the chain-link fences, held the tall weeds in the gardens at a steep slant, shoved at the car windows.
Fiona said, “I read in the paper they’re talking about bulldozing these places, the ghost estates. Just smash them down to the ground, walk away and pretend it never happened.”
For one last second, I saw Broken Harbor the way it should have been. The lawn mowers buzzing and the radios blasting sweet fast beats while men washed their cars in the drives, the little kids shrieking and swerving on scooters; the girls out jogging with their ponytails bouncing, the women leaning over the garden fences to swap news, the teenagers shoving and giggling and flirting on every corner; color exploding from geranium pots and new cars and children’s toys, smell of fresh paint and barbecue blowing on the sea wind. The image leapt out of the air, so strong that I saw it more clearly than all the rusting pipes and potholed dirt. I said, “That’s a shame.”
“It’s good riddance. It should’ve happened four years ago, before this place was ever built: burn the plans and walk away. Better late than never.”
I had got the hang of the estate: I got us to the Spains’ house on the first try, without asking Fiona for directions-she had vanished into her mind again, and I was happy to leave her there. When I parked the car and opened my door, the wind roared in, filling my ears and my eyes like cold water.
I said, “I’ll be back in a few minutes. Go through the motions of finding something in your pocket, just in case someone’s watching.” The Gogans’ curtains hadn’t moved, but it was only a matter of time. “If anyone comes over to you, don’t talk to them.” Fiona nodded, out the window.
The padlock was still in place: the souvenir hunters and ghouls were biding their time. I found the key I had taken off Dr. Dolittle. When I stepped inside out of the wind, the instant silence rang in my ears.
I rummaged through kitchen cupboards, not bothering to stay clear of the blood spatter, till I found a bin-liner. I took it upstairs and threw things into it, working fast-Sinead Gogan was presumably glued to her front window by now, and would be happy to tell anyone who asked exactly how long I had spent in here. When I was done, I put on my gloves and opened Jenny’s jewelry box.
The charm bracelet was laid out in a little compartment all its own, ready to put on. The golden heart, the tiny golden house, glowing in the soft light drifting through the cream lampshade; the curly E, chips of diamond sparkling; the J, enameled in red; the diamond drop that must have been for Jenny’s twenty-first. There was plenty of room left on the chain, for all the wonderful things that had still been going to happen.
I left the bin-liner on the floor and took the bracelet into Emma’s room. I switched on the light-I wasn’t about to do this with the curtains open. The room was the way Richie and I had left it when we finished searching: tidy, full of thought and love and pink, only the stripped bed to tell you something had happened here. On the bedside table the monitor was flashing a warning:
Emma’s hairbrush-pink, with a pony on the back-was on her chest of drawers. I picked out the hairs carefully, matching the lengths, holding them up-they were so fine and fair, at the wrong angle they vanished into the light-to find the ones with roots and skin tags still attached where a careless sweep of the brush had tugged too hard. In the end I had eight.
I smoothed them together into a tiny lock, held the roots between thumb and finger and wound the other end into the charm bracelet. It took me a few tries-on the chain, the clasp, the little gold heart-before it caught tightly enough, in the loop holding the enameled J, that a tug jerked the hairs free of my fingers and left them fluttering against the gold.
I put the bracelet around one hand and pulled till a link bent open. It left a red mark across my palm, but Jenny’s wrists had been covered with bruises and abrasions where Pat had tried to hold her off. Any one of them, blurred by the others, could have come from the bracelet.
Emma had fought; Cooper had told us that already. For a moment she had managed to pull the pillow off her head. As Jenny scrabbled to get it back into place, her bracelet had snagged in Emma’s whipping hair. Emma had grabbed hold of it, yanked till a weak link bent, then lost her grip; her hand had been trapped under the pillow again, nothing left in it but a few strands of her own hair.
The bracelet had stayed on Jenny’s wrist while she finished what she was doing. As she went downstairs to find Pat, the bent link had slipped loose.
Probably it wouldn’t be enough for a conviction. Emma’s hair could have snagged in the bracelet as Jenny brushed it before bed, that last evening; the link could have caught on a door handle as she rushed downstairs to see what the commotion was. The whole thing was dripping with reasonable doubt. But together with everything else, it would be enough to arrest her, charge her, to keep her on remand while she waited for trial.
That can take a year or more. By then Jenny would have spent plenty of time with various psychiatrists and psychologists, who would shower her with meds and counseling and everything else that would give her a chance of stepping back from that windswept edge. If she changed her mind about dying, she would plead guilty: there was nothing else she needed to get out for, and a guilty plea would take the shadow off Pat and Conor both. If she didn’t change her mind, then someone would spot what she was planning-in spite of what some people think, most mental-health professionals know their job-and do what they could to keep her somewhere safe. I had told Fiona the truth: it wasn’t perfect, far from it, but there was no place left for perfect in this case.
Before I left Emma’s room I pulled back one of her curtains and stood at the window, looking out at the rows of half-houses and the beach beyond them. The winter was starting to draw in; it was barely three o’clock, but already the light was gathering that evening melancholy and the blue had leached out of the sea, leaving it a restless gray streaked with white foam. In Conor’s hide, the plastic sheeting thrummed with the wind; the houses around it
