Broken Harbour

“Of what?” I asked.

Sinead gave me a sour stare. “Us. Me.” I couldn’t think of a single reason why Jenny Spain would have been jealous of these people, but apparently that was beside the point. Our Sinead probably figured she hadn’t been invited to Beyonce’s hen party because Beyonce was jealous.

“Right,” I said. “When was this, exactly?”

“Spring. April, maybe. Why? Is she saying Jayden done something on them? Because he never-”

She was half out of her chair, heavy and threatening. “No, no, no,” I said soothingly. “When was the last time you saw the Spains?”

After a moment she decided she believed me and settled back down. “To talk to, that was it. I see them around, but I’ve got nothing to say to them, not after that. Saw her going into the house with the kids yesterday afternoon.”

“At what time?”

“Around quarter to five, maybe. I’d say she was after getting the young one from school and going to the shops-she’d a couple of carrier bags. She looked grand. The little fella was throwing a tantrum ’cause he wanted crisps. Spoilt.”

“Were you and your husband home last night?” I asked.

“Yeah. Where would we go? There’s nowhere. Nearest pub’s in the town, twelve miles away.” Whelan’s and Lynch’s were presumably under concrete and scaffolding now, razed to make way for shiny new versions that hadn’t materialized yet. For a second I smelled Sunday lunch at Whelan’s: chicken nuggets and chips deep-fried from frozen, cigarette smoke, Cidona. “Go all that way and then not be able to drink ’cause you’ve to drive home-there’s no buses that go here. What’s the point?”

“Did you hear anything out of the ordinary?”

Another stare, this one more antagonistic, like I had accused her of something and she was considering glassing me. “What would we have heard?”

Jayden sniggered suddenly. I said, “Did you hear something, Jayden?”

“What, like screams?” Jayden asked. He had even turned around.

“Did you hear screams?”

Pissed-off grimace. “Nah.” Sooner or later some other detective was going to be running into Jayden in a whole different context.

“Then what did you hear? Anything at all could help us.”

Sinead’s face still had that look, antagonism cut with something like wariness. She said, “We heard nothing. We’d the telly on.”

“Yeah,” Jayden said. “Nothing.” Something on the screen exploded. He said, “Shit,” and dived back into the game.

I asked, “What about your husband, Mrs. Gogan?”

“He didn’t hear nothing either.”

“Could we confirm that with him?”

“He’s gone out.”

“What time will he be back?”

Shrug. “What’s after happening?”

I said, “Can you tell us if you’ve seen anyone entering or leaving the Spains’ house recently?”

Sinead’s mouth pursed up. “I don’t be spying on my neighbors,” she snapped, which meant she did, as if I had had any doubts.

“I’m sure you don’t,” I said. “But this isn’t about spying. You’re not blind or deaf; you can’t help it if you see people coming and going, or hear their cars. How many houses on this road are occupied?”

“Four. Us, and them, and two down the other end. So?”

“So if you see someone around this end, you can’t help knowing they’re here for the Spains. So have they had any visitors recently?”

She rolled her eyes. “If they have, I didn’t see them. All right?”

“Not as popular as they think,” Richie said, with a little smirk.

Sinead smirked back. “Exactly.”

He leaned forward. Confidentially: “Does anyone bother coming out to them at all?”

“Not any more, they don’t. When we first moved in, they’d have people over on a Sunday: the same kind as themselves, driving up in the big SUVs and all, swanning around with bottles of wine-a few cans weren’t good enough for them. They used to have barbecues. Showing off again.”

“Not these days?”

The smirk got bigger. “Not since he lost his job. They’d a birthday party for one of the kids, back in spring, but that’s the last time I saw anyone go in there. Like I said, though, I don’t be watching. But it just goes to show you, doesn’t it?”

“It does, yeah. Tell us something: have you had any hassle with mice, rats, anything like that?”

That got Jayden’s attention. He even hit Pause. “Jesus! Did rats eat them?”

“No,” I said.

“Ahhh,” he said, disappointed, but he kept watching us. The kid was unnerving. He had flat, colorless eyes, like a squid.

His mother said, “Never had rats. I wouldn’t be surprised, the way the drains are in this place, but no. Not yet, anyway.”

Richie said, “It isn’t great out here, no?”

“It’s a dump,” Jayden said.

“Yeah? Why?”

He shrugged. Sinead said, “Have you looked at the place?”

“Looks all right to me,” Richie said, surprised. “Nice houses, loads of space, you’ve done the place up lovely…”

“Yeah, that’s what we thought. Looked great on the plans. Hang on-”

She heaved herself out of the chair with a grunt and bent over-I could have lived without that view-to paw through the mess on a side table: celebrity magazines, spilled sugar, a baby monitor, half a sausage roll on a greasy plate. “Here,” she said, shoving a brochure at Richie. “That’s what we thought we were buying.”

The front of the brochure said OCEAN VIEW, in the same curly writing as the signboard outside the estate, over a photo of a laughing couple hugging two catalog kids in front of a snow-white house and Mediterranean-blue waves. Inside was the menu: four-bed, five-bed, detached, duplex, whatever your heart desired, all of them so pristine they almost glowed and so well Photoshopped you could barely tell they were scale models. The houses had names: the Diamond was a five-bed detached with garage, the Topaz was a two-bed duplex, the Emerald and the Pearl and the rest were somewhere in between-it looked like we were in the Sapphire. More curly lettering cooed breathlessly about the beach, the childcare facility, the leisure center, a corner shop, a playground, “a self- contained haven with all the premier facilities of cutting-edge luxe living on your doorstep.”

It should have looked pretty damn sexy-like I said before, other people can get their kicks being snobby about new developments if they want, but I love them; they feel positive, like big bets placed on the future. For some reason, though-maybe because I’d seen what was outside-this brochure struck me as what Richie would have called creepy.

Sinead jabbed a stubby finger at the brochure. “That’s what we were promised. All that. Says it in the contract and everything.”

“And that’s not what you got?” Richie asked.

She snorted. “Does it look like it?”

He shrugged. “It’s not finished yet. Could be great when it is.”

“It’s not going to be bleeding finished. People stopped buying, with the recession, so the builders stopped building. We went out one morning a few months back and they were gone. Everything, diggers and all. Never came back.”

“Jaysus,” Richie said, shaking his head.

“Yeah, Jaysus. Our downstairs toilet’s banjaxed, but the plumber who put it in won’t come and fix it ’cause he was never paid. Everyone does be saying we should go to court and get compensation, but who’d we bring?”