Broken Harbour

on Jenny’s side were three framed eight-by-tens. Two were squashy red babies; the one in the middle was a wedding shot taken on the stairway of some fancy country house hotel. Patrick in a tux with a pink tie and a pink rose in his buttonhole, Jenny in a fitted dress with a train that spread out over the stairs below them, bouquet of pink roses, lots of dark wood, lances of sunlight through the ornate landing window. Jenny was pretty, or had been. Average height, nice slim figure, with long hair that she had turned straight and blond and twisted into some complicated thing on top of her head. Patrick had been in better shape then, broad-chested and flat-stomached. He had an arm around Jenny, and both of them were smiling from ear to ear.

I said, “Let’s start with the chests of drawers,” and headed for Jenny’s. If one of this pair had secrets stashed away, it was her. The world would be a different place, a lot more difficult for us and a lot more ignorantly blissful for husbands, if women would just throw things away.

The top drawer was mainly makeup, plus a pill packet-Monday’s pill was gone, she had been up-to-date-and a blue velvet jewelry box. She was into jewelry, everything from cheap bling through some nice tasteful pieces that looked pretty upmarket to me-my ex-wife liked her rocks, I know my way around carats. The emerald ring Fiona had mentioned was still there, in a battered black presentation box, waiting for Emma to grow up. I said, “Look at this.”

Richie glanced across from Patrick’s underwear drawer-he was working fast and neatly, giving each pair of boxers a quick shake and tossing it on a pile on the floor. He said, “So, not robbery.”

“Probably not. Nothing professional, anyway. If things went wrong, an amateur might get spooked and run for it, but a professional-or a debt collector-wouldn’t go without getting what he came for.”

“An amateur doesn’t fit. Like we said before: this wasn’t random.”

“True enough. Can you give me a theory that does cover what we’ve got?”

Richie unrolled pairs of socks and dumped them on the pile, getting his ideas straight. “The intruder Jenny talked about,” he said, after a moment. “Let’s say he finds a way to get back in, more than once maybe. Fiona said herself, Jenny wouldn’t have told her.”

No clandestine condoms at the bottom of the jewelry box, no wraps of Mummy’s Little Helper tucked in with the makeup brushes. I said, “But Jenny did tell Fiona she was going to start using the alarm. How does he get around that?”

“He got around the locks, the first time. Looks like Patrick thought he was coming in through the attic. He might’ve been right. Up through the house next door, maybe.”

“If Larry and his team had found an access point in the attic, they’d have told us. And you heard them: they looked.”

Richie started folding socks and boxers back into the drawer, taking care over it. We don’t generally bother to leave things perfect; I couldn’t tell whether he was thinking of Jenny having to come home to this place-which, given the odds of anyone buying it, was actually a possibility-or of Fiona having to clean it out. Either way, the empathy was something he was going to have to watch. He said, “OK, so maybe your man’s got a way around the alarm system. That could be what he does for a living. Could even be how he picked the Spains: he installed their system, got hung up on them…”

“The system came with the house, according to that brochure. It was here before they were. Dial back the Cable Guy there, old son.” Jenny’s underwear drawer was divided neatly into special- occasion sexies, white exercise gear and what I assumed were everyday pink-and-white frillies; nothing kinky, no toys, apparently the Spains had been good old vanilla. “But let’s assume, just for a moment, that our man’s found a way to gain access. Then what?”

“He starts getting more in-your-face, smashes those holes in the walls. No way to stop Patrick from finding out then. Maybe Patrick thinks like Jenny: he wants to know what the story is here, he’d rather catch the guy than shut him out or scare him off. So he sets up surveillance on the spots where he knows, or thinks, your man’s been.”

“So that’s a man trap, up in the attic. To catch the guy in the act and keep him there till we arrive.”

Richie said, “Or till Patrick was done with him. Depending.”

I raised my eyebrows. “You’ve got a twisted mind, my son. That’s a good thing. Don’t let it run away with you, though.”

“If someone scared your wife, threatened your kids…” Richie shook out a pair of khakis; next to his scrawny arse they looked huge, like they had belonged to a superhero. He said, “You might be on for doing some damage.”

“It hangs together, near enough. It hangs.” I slid Jenny’s underwear drawer shut. “Except for one thing: why?”

“You mean why would your man be after the Spains, like?”

“Why would he do any of it? We’re talking about months of stalking, topped off with mass murder. Why pick this family? Why break in and do nothing worse than eat ham slices? Why break in again and bash the walls in? Why escalate to murder? Why take the risk of starting with the kids? Why suffocate them but stab the adults? Why any of it?”

Richie fished fifty cents out of the back pocket of the khakis and shrugged-he did it like a kid, shoulders jumping around his ears. “Maybe he’s mental.”

I stopped what I was doing. “Is that what you’re planning on putting in the file for the Director of Public Prosecutions? ‘I dunno, maybe he’s, like, totally mental’?”

Richie flushed, but he didn’t back down. “I don’t know what the doctors’d call it. But you know what I mean.”

“Actually, old son, I don’t. ‘Mental’ isn’t a reason. It comes in an awful lot of flavors, most of them are non- violent, and every single one of them has some kind of logic, whether or not it makes sense to you and me. Nobody slaughters a family because, hey, I just felt mental today.”

“You asked for a theory that covers what we’ve got. That’s the best I can come up with.”

“A theory that’s built on ‘because he’s mental’ isn’t a theory. It’s a cheap cop-out. And it’s lazy thinking. I expect better from you, Detective.”

I turned my shoulder to him and went back to the drawers, but I could feel him behind me, not moving. I said, “Spit it out.”

“What I told your woman Gogan. That she didn’t need to worry about some psycho. I just wanted to stop her ringing around the talk shows, but fact is, she’s got a right to be scared. I don’t know what word you want me to use, but if this fella’s mental, then nobody has to go asking for trouble. He’s bringing it with him.”

I slid the drawer shut, leaned back against the chest and stuck my hands in my pockets. “There was a philosopher,” I said, “a few hundred years back, who said you should always go for the simplest solution. And he wasn’t talking about the easy answer. He meant the solution that involves throwing in the fewest extras on top of what you’ve actually got on hand. The fewest ifs and maybes, the fewest unknown guys who might possibly have just happened to wander up in the middle of the action. Do you see where I’m going with this?”

Richie said, “You don’t think there was any intruder.”

“Wrong. I think that what we’ve got on hand is Patrick and Jennifer Spain, and any solution that involves them needs fewer extras than a solution that doesn’t. What happened here came from one of two places: inside this house, or outside. I’m not saying there was no intruder. I’m saying that even if the killer came from outside, the simplest solution is that the reason came from inside.”

“Hang on,” Richie said. “You said: still room for an outsider. And that thing with the attic hatch: you said maybe to catch the guy who made the holes. What…?”

I sighed. “Richie. When I said outsider, I was talking about the guy who lent Patrick Spain gambling money. The guy Jenny was shagging on the side. Fiona Rafferty. I wasn’t talking about Freddy bloody Krueger. Do you see the difference?”

“Yeah,” Richie said. His voice was even, but the set of his jaw said he was starting to get annoyed. “I do.”

“I know this case looks-what’s the word you used?-creepy. I know it’s the kind of thing that gets the imagination working overtime. That’s all the more reason to keep your feet on the ground. The most likely solution here is still what it was when we were driving up: your bog-standard murder-suicide.”

“That,” Richie said, pointing at the hole above the bed, “that isn’t bog-standard. Just for starters.”

“How do you know? Maybe all the free time was getting on Patrick Spain’s nerves and he decided to go in for some kind of home improvement, or maybe there’s something dicky in the electrics, just like you suggested, and he