I’d like to know a little more about the history there. I’ve seen stranger love triangles in my time.”
Richie nodded, still examining the photo. “Fiona’s only small. You think she could’ve taken out a big fella like Patrick?”
“With a sharp blade, and the element of surprise? Yeah, I think she probably could have. I’m not saying she’s top of the list, but we can’t cross her off it quite yet.”
Fiona moved another notch or two up the list when we got back to searching. Tucked away at the bottom of Patrick’s wardrobe, behind the shoe rack, was the jackpot: a stocky gray filing box. Out of sight-it didn’t go with the decor-but not out of mind: they had kept three years’ worth of just about everything, all filed away in perfect order. I could have kissed the box. If I had to pick just one angle on a victim’s life, give me financials any day. People wrap their e-mails and their friendships and even their diaries in multiple layers of bullshit, but their credit-card statements never lie.
All this stuff would be coming back to headquarters so we could get a lot better acquainted, but I wanted an overview straightaway. We sat on the bed-Richie hesitated for a second, like he might contaminate it, or maybe vice versa-and spread out paper.
The big documents came first: four birth certs, four passports, marriage cert. They had a life insurance policy, up-to-date, that paid off the mortgage if either of them died. There had been another policy, two hundred grand on Patrick and a hundred on Jenny, but that had lapsed over the summer. Their will left everything to each other; if they both died, everything including custody of the kids went to Fiona. There are plenty of people out there who would love a few hundred grand and a new house, and who would love it even more if it didn’t come with a couple of kids attached.
And then we hit the financials, and Fiona Rafferty plummeted so far down the list I could barely see her. The Spains had kept things simple, everything into and out of one joint account, which was a bonus for us. And just like we had expected, they were flat broke. Patrick’s old job had given him a nice little lump of redundancy money, but since then the only cash coming in had been the dole. And they had kept spending. February, March, April, the money had kept coming out of the account at the same rate as ever. May, they had started cutting back. By August, the whole family had been living on less than I do.
Too little too late. The mortgage was three months in arrears and there were two letters from the lender-some cowboy-sounding outfit called HomeTime-the second one a lot nastier than the first. In June the Spains had swapped their bill-pay mobiles for pay-as-you-go, and both of them had more or less stopped calling people-four months’ worth of phone-credit receipts were paper-clipped together, barely enough to keep a teenage girl going for a week. The SUV had gone back where it came from at the end of July; they were a month behind on the Volvo, four months behind on the credit card and fifty quid behind on the electricity. As of their last statement, there had been three hundred and fourteen euros and fifty-seven cents in the current account. If the Spains had been into anything dodgy, they were either very bad at it or very, very good.
Even when they got careful, though, they had kept their wireless broadband. I needed to get Computer Crime to flag that computer every shade of urgent. Patrick and Jenny might have had no one in the flesh, but they had had the whole internet to talk to, and some people tell cyberspace the things they wouldn’t tell their best friends.
In a way, you could probably say they had been broke even before Patrick lost his job. He had made good money, but their credit card had a six-grand limit and it had spent most of the time maxed out-there were a lot of three-figure charges to Brown Thomas, Debenhams, a few websites with vaguely familiar girly names-and then there were the two car loans and the mortgage. But only innocents think broke is made of how much you earn and how much you owe. Ask any economist: broke is made of how you feel. The credit crunch didn’t happen because people woke up any poorer than they’d been the day before; it happened because people woke up scared.
Back in January, when Jenny had spent 270 euros on some website called Shoe 2 You, the Spains had been doing just fine. By July, when she had been too scared to change the locks against an intruder, they had been broke as all hell.
Some people get hit by a tidal wave, dig in their nails and hold on; they stay focused on the positive, keep visualizing the way through till it opens up in front of them. Some lose hold. Broke can lead people to places they would never have imagined. It can nudge a law-abiding citizen onto that blurred crumbling edge where a dozen kinds of crime feel like they’re only an arm’s reach away. It can scour away at a lifetime of mild, peaceful decency until all that’s left is teeth and claws and terror. You could almost catch the stench of fear, dank as rotting seaweed, coming up from the dark space at the back of the closet where the Spains had kept their monsters locked down. I said, “It looks like we might not need to go chasing after sister-history, after all.”
Richie ran a thumb through the bank statements again, came to rest on that pathetic last page. “Jesus,” he said, shaking his head.
“Straight-up guy, wife and kids, good job, got his house and his life just the way he likes them; then out of the blue, hey presto, it’s crumbling around his ears. His job’s gone, his car’s gone, his house is going-for all we know, Jenny could have been planning to leave him now that he wasn’t providing, take the kids with her. That could have been what pushed him over the edge.”
“All in less than a year,” Richie said. He put the bank statements down on the bed next to the HomeTime letters, holding them between his fingertips like they were radioactive. “Yeah. That could do it, all right.”
“We’ve still got plenty of ifs on the table. But if Larry’s lads don’t find any evidence of an outsider, and if the weapon turns up somewhere accessible, and if Jenny Spain doesn’t wake up and give us a very plausible story about how someone other than her husband did this… This case could be over a lot sooner than we were expecting.”
That was when my phone rang again.
“And there you go,” I said, fishing it out of my pocket. “How much do you want to bet this is one of the floaters to say we’ve got the weapon, somewhere nice and close?”
It was Marlboro Man, and he was so excited his voice was cracking like a teenager’s. “Sir,” he said. “Sir, you need to see this.”
He was in Ocean View Walk, the double line of houses-you couldn’t exactly call it a street-between Ocean View Rise and the water. The other floaters’ heads popped out of gaps in walls as we passed, like curious animals’. Marlboro Man waved to us from a second-floor window.
The house had got as far as walls and roof, gray blocks heavy with tangled green creepers. The front garden was chest-high weeds and gorse, crowding up the drive and in at the empty doorway. We had to climb the rusted scaffolding, shaking creepers off our feet, and swing ourselves through a window-hole.
Marlboro Man said, “I wasn’t sure whether to… I mean, I know you were busy, sir, but you said to call you if we found anything that could be interesting. And this…”
Someone had, carefully and over plenty of time, turned the top floor of the house into his own private lair. A sleeping bag, one of the serious ones meant for semi-professional wilderness expeditions, weighted down at the bottom with a rough lump of concrete. Thick plastic sheeting tacked over the window-holes, to keep out the wind. Three two-liter bottles of water, neatly lined up against a wall. A clear plastic storage tub just big enough for a stick of Right Guard, a bar of soap, a washcloth, a toothbrush and a tube of toothpaste. A dustpan and brush in one clean corner: no spiderwebs here. A supermarket bag holding another chunk of concrete, a couple of empty Lucozade bottles, a crumple of chocolate wrappers and a sandwich crust sticking out of squashed tinfoil. One of those plastic rain hoods that old women wear, hung on a nail in a beam. And a pair of black binoculars, lying on top of the sleeping bag next to their battered case.
They didn’t look particularly high-end, but then they hadn’t needed to be. The back window-holes looked straight down into Patrick and Jenny Spain’s lovely glass kitchen, just thirty or forty feet away. Larry and his gang were discussing something to do with one of the beanbags.
“Sweet Jaysus,” Richie said softly.
I didn’t say a word. I was so angry that all that would have come out was a roar. Everything I knew about this case had lifted itself high, heaved itself upside down and come slamming down on top of me. This wasn’t the lookout post for some hitman hired to get back money or drugs-a professional would have cleaned up before he did the job, we would never have known he had been there. This was Richie’s mentaller, bringing all his own trouble with him.
