Broken Harbour

“Are you sure? That’s an awful lot of hassle to go to because someone doesn’t answer her phone.”

A tense shrug. Fiona balanced the foam cup carefully beside her, tapped ash. “I wanted to make sure she was OK.”

“Why wouldn’t she have been?”

“Because. We always talk. Every day, for years. And I was right, wasn’t I? She wasn’t OK.”

Her chin wobbled. I leaned in close to give her a tissue, didn’t lean back. “Ms. Rafferty,” I said. “We both know there was more to it than that. You don’t ditch work, possibly annoy a client, and drive for an hour, just because your sister’s out of touch for forty-five minutes. You could have assumed that she’d gone to bed with a migraine, or that she’d lost her phone, or that the kids had come down with the flu, or any one of several hundred things, all of them a lot more likely than this. Instead, you jumped straight to the conclusion that something was wrong. You need to tell me why.”

Fiona bit down on her bottom lip. The air stank of cigarette smoke and singed wool-she had dropped hot ash on her coat, somewhere in there-and there was a dank, bitter smell coming off her, spreading on her breath and seeping out of her pores. Interesting fact from the front lines: raw grief smells like ripped leaves and splintered branches, a jagged green shriek.

“It wasn’t anything,” she said, finally. “It was ages ago-months. I’d practically forgotten about it, till…”

I waited.

“It was just… She rang me one evening. She said someone had been in the house.”

I felt Richie snap to attention at my shoulder, like a terrier ready to dash off after his stick. “Did she report this?” I asked.

Fiona rubbed out her cigarette and dropped the butt into the cup. “It wasn’t like that. There was nothing to report. There wasn’t, like, a window broken or the lock smashed or whatever, and there wasn’t anything taken.”

“Then what made her think someone had been in the house?”

The shrug again, even tenser this time. Her head had gone down. “She just thought. I don’t know.”

I said, letting the firm start to edge out the gentle, “This could be important, Ms. Rafferty. What did she say, exactly?”

Fiona took a deep, shuddering breath and pushed hair behind her ear. “OK,” she said. “OK. OK. So Jenny rings me, right, and she’s like, ‘Did you make a copy of our keys?’ I had their keys for about two seconds last winter, Jenny and Pat took the kids to the Canaries for a week and they wanted to know someone could get in if there was a fire or whatever. So I say no, course not-”

“Did you?” Richie asked. “Make a copy?” He pulled it off-he managed to sound just plain interested, not the slightest bit accusing. Which was nice: it meant I wouldn’t have to give him shit, or at least not too big a helping of it, for talking out of turn.

“No! Why would I?”

She had shot upright. Richie shrugged, gave her a deprecating little smile. “Just checking. I’ve got to ask, you know?”

Fiona slumped back. “Yeah. I guess.”

“And no one else could have made copies, that week? You didn’t leave the keys where your flatmates could have taken them, or someone at work-nothing like that? Like I said, we have to ask.”

“I had them on my key ring. They weren’t in a safe or anything-when I’m in work I have my keys in my bag, and when I’m home they’re on a hook in the kitchen. But it’s not like anyone would’ve known what they were, even if they cared. I don’t think I even told anyone that I had them.”

Her flatmates and her workmates were going to be having in-depth chats all the same, not to mention background checks. “Let’s get back to the phone conversation,” I said. “You told Jenny you hadn’t copied her keys…”

“Yeah. Jenny says, ‘Well, someone’s got them, and you’re the only person we gave them to.’ It takes me like half an hour to convince her I don’t have a clue what she’s on about, so she’ll even tell me what’s the story. Finally she says her and the kids were out for the afternoon, at the shops or somewhere, and when she got back someone had been through the house.” Fiona had started picking the tissue to shreds, white wisps floating down on the red of her coat. She had small hands, slim-fingered, with bitten nails. “I ask her how she knows, and at first she won’t say, but finally I get it out of her: the curtains are hooked back all wrong, and she’s missing half a packet of ham and the pen she keeps by the fridge for making shopping lists. I’m like, ‘You have got to be joking,’ and she nearly hangs up on me. So I talk her down, and once she stops giving me hassle, she sounds really freaked out, you know? Really scared. And Jenny isn’t a wimp.”

This was one of the reasons I had come down hard on Richie for trying to postpone this interview. If you get someone talking right after his world ends, there’s a decent chance he won’t be able to stop. Wait till the next day and he’ll already be starting to rebuild his pulverized defenses-people work fast, when the stakes are that high-but catch him straight after the mushroom cloud unfurls and he’ll spill anything from his tastes in porn to his secret nickname for the boss. “Natural enough,” I said. “That’d be pretty unsettling.”

“It was ham slices and a pen! If her jewelry was gone, or half her underwear or something, then yeah, sure, lose the head. But this stuff… I said to her, ‘OK, let’s say somehow someone for some weird reason got in, he wasn’t exactly Hannibal Lecter, was he?’”

I asked, before it could hit her what she had just said, “What did Jenny think of that?”

“She got furious with me again. She said the big deal wasn’t what he’d actually done; it was all the stuff she couldn’t be sure about. Like if he’d been in the kids’ rooms, gone through their stuff-Jenny said if they could afford it she’d throw away everything the kids had, start over, just in case. What he’d touched-she said everything looked like it was out of place all of a sudden, just an inch, or like it was smudged. How he got in. Why he got in-that was really getting to her. She kept saying, ‘Why us? What did he want off us? Do we look like a target? What?’”

Fiona shivered, a sudden jerk that almost doubled her over. I said easily, “It’s a good question. They have an alarm system; do you know if it was set that day?”

She shook her head. “I asked. Jenny said no. She never used to bother, not during the day-I think they’d set it at night, when they went to bed, but that was because the local kids throw parties and stuff in the empty houses, they can get pretty out of control sometimes. Jenny said the estate was basically dead during the day-well, you can see for yourselves-so she hadn’t been bothering. But she said she was going to start. She said, ‘If you’ve got those keys, you’d better not use them. I’m changing the alarm code now and after this it stays on, day and night, end of story.’ Like I said, she sounded really scared.”

But when the uniforms had broken down the door and the four of us had gone tramping all over Jenny’s precious house, the alarm had been off. The obvious explanation was that, if anyone had come in from outside, the Spains had opened the door themselves; that Jenny, scared as she was, hadn’t been scared of this person. “Did she change the locks?”

“I asked that, too-was she going to. She went back and forth, but in the end she said no, probably not, it’d be a couple of hundred quid and the budget couldn’t stretch to that. The alarm would be enough. She said, ‘I don’t even mind that much if he tries to get in again. I’d almost rather he did. At least then we’d know.’ I told you: she’s not a wimp.”

“Where had Pat been that day? Was this before he lost his job?”

“No, after. He’d gone down to Athlone, for a job interview-this was back when him and Jenny still had the two cars.”

“What did he think about the possible break-in?”

“I don’t know. She never said. I thought… to be honest, I thought she hadn’t told him. She was keeping her voice right down, on the phone-that could’ve been just because the kids were asleep, but in a house that size? And she kept saying ‘I’-‘I’m changing the alarm code, I couldn’t fit that in the budget, I’ll sort the guy if I get him.’ Not ‘we.’”

And there it was again: the little thing out of place, the gift I had told Richie to keep his eyes peeled for. “Why wouldn’t she tell Pat? Shouldn’t that be the first thing she did, if she thought they’d had intruders?”

Another shrug. Fiona’s chin was tucked down into her chest. “Because she didn’t want to worry him, I guess.