Broken Harbour

I moved her away from Richie, who was trying to get his jaw off the cobblestones. He looked like he was seeing me in a whole new light. “I’ve got you, sweetheart. What’s up?”

“I can’t, Mikey, I can feel stuff in my hair, you know, the wind scraping into my hair? It hurts, it keeps hurting, I can’t find the, not the off switch the button the way it stops.”

My stomach turned into one hard heavy lump. “OK,” I said. “OK. Do you need to come back to my place for a while, yeah?”

“We have to go. You have to listen.”

“We’re going, sweetheart. Just hang on for one second, OK?” I steered her to the steps of one of the castle buildings, closed up for the night after the day’s crop of tourists. “Sit there for me.”

“Why? Where are you going?”

She was on the edge of panicking. “Right over there,” I said, pointing. “I need to get rid of my partner, so you and I can head home. It’ll take me two seconds.”

“I don’t want your partner. Mikey, there won’t be room, how are we going to squash the fit?”

“Exactly. I don’t want him either. I’ll just send him on his merry way, and then we can get going.” I sat her down on the steps. “OK?”

Dina pulled her knees up and shoved her mouth into the crook of her elbow. “OK,” she said, muffled. “Come on, OK?”

Richie was pretending to check his phone messages, to give me privacy. I kept one eye on Dina. “Listen, Richie. I may not be able to make tonight. Are you still on for it?”

I could see the question marks bouncing up and down in his head, but he knew when to keep his mouth shut. “Sure.”

“Good. Pick a floater. He-or she, if you want Whatshername-can put in for overtime, although you might try to get across the message that waiving it would be a better career move. If anything goes down out there, you ring me at once. It doesn’t matter if you think it’s unimportant, it doesn’t matter if you think you can handle it, you ring me. Got that?”

“Got it.”

“In fact, if nothing goes down, ring me anyway, just so I know I’m up to speed. Every hour, on the hour. If I don’t pick up, you keep ringing till I do. Got it?”

“Got it.”

“Tell the Super I had an emergency but not to worry, I’ll have it under control and be back on the job by tomorrow morning at the latest. Brief him on today and on our plans for tonight-can you do that?”

“I can probably manage that, yeah.”

The twist to the corner of Richie’s mouth said he didn’t appreciate the question, but his ego was low on my priority list right then. “No ‘probably,’ old son: manage it. Tell him the floaters have their assignments for tomorrow, so do the searchers, and we need a sub-aqua team to start work on the bay as early as possible. As soon as you’re done with him, get moving. You’ll need food, warm clothes, a packet of caffeine tabs-coffee’s no good, you don’t want to be pissing every half-hour-and a pair of thermal-imaging goggles: we have to assume this guy has some kind of night-vision gear, and I don’t want him getting the jump on you. And check your gun.” Most of us go a full career without ever unholstering. Some people take that as a license to get sloppy.

“Yeah, I’ve done a couple of stakeouts before,” Richie said, evenly enough that I couldn’t tell whether he was giving me the finger. “See you back here, tomorrow morning?”

Dina was getting antsy, biting off threads from the sleeve of her jumper. “No,” I said. “Not here. I’ll try to get out to Brianstown at some point tonight, but that may or may not happen. If I don’t make it, I’ll meet you down at the hospital for the post-mortems. Six A.M., and for God’s sake don’t be late, or we’ll spend the rest of the morning unknotting Cooper’s knickers.”

“No probs.” Richie pocketed his phone. “Might see you out there. Otherwise, we’ll just have to do our best not to fuck up, yeah?”

I said, “Don’t fuck up.”

“We won’t,” Richie said, more gently; he almost sounded like he was being reassuring. “Good luck.”

He gave me a nod and headed for the door of HQ. He was smart enough not to glance back. “Mikey,” Dina hissed, clutching a fistful of the back of my coat. “Can we go?”

I took a fraction of a second to look up at the dimming sky and throw out a hard urgent prayer to anything that was up there: Let my man have more restraint than I’m giving him credit for. Don’t let him go rushing into Richie’s arms. Make him wait for me.

“Come on,” I said, putting a hand on Dina’s shoulder-she shoved herself up against my side, all sharp elbows and fast breath, like a spooked animal. “Let’s go.”

* * *

The first thing you need to do with Dina on days like this is get her indoors. A big part of what looks like madness is actually just tension, free-floating terror growing bigger as it gets buffeted around in currents and hooks onto everything that drifts past: she ends up frozen rigid by the immensity and the unpredictability of the world, like a prey animal trapped in the open. Get her into a familiar enclosed space with no strangers, no loud noises and no sudden movements, and she calms down, even has long lucid patches, while the two of you wait it out together. Dina was one of the factors I kept in mind when I was buying my apartment, after my ex and I sold our house. We picked a good time to split, or so I keep telling myself: the property market was on its way up, and my half of the equity got me a deposit on a fourth-floor two-bed in the Financial Services Center. It’s central enough that I can walk to work, trendy enough that it made me feel a little less like a loser for failing at marriage, and high enough that Dina won’t be spooked by street noise.

“Yes thank God about time,” she said, on a wild rush of relief, when I unlocked the apartment. She shoved past me and pressed her back against the wall by the door, eyes closed, taking deep breaths. “Mike, I need a towel shower, can I?”

I found her a towel. She dumped her handbag on the floor, vanished into the bathroom and slammed the door behind her.

Dina on a bad one could stay in the shower all night, as long as the hot water doesn’t run out and she knows you’re outside the door. She says she feels better in water because it makes her mind go blank, which is crammed with so many kinds of Jung that I wouldn’t even know where to start. As soon as I heard the water running and her starting to sing to herself, I shut the living-room door and phoned Geri.

I hate making this call more than I hate almost anything in the world. Geri has three kids, ten and eleven and fifteen, a job doing the books for her best friend’s interior design company, and a husband she doesn’t see enough of. All those people need her. No one alive needs anything from me except Dina and Geri and my father, and what Geri needs most is for me not to make this phone call. I do everything in my power. It had been years since I had let her down.

“Mick! Hang on a sec for me, till I get this wash started-” Slam, click of buttons, mechanical hum. “Now. Is everything OK? Did you get my message?”

“Yeah, I got it. Geri-”

“Andrea! I saw that! You give it back to him right now or I’ll let him have your one, and you don’t want that, do you? No, you do not.”

“Geri. Listen to me. Dina’s losing it again. I have her over at my place, she’s taking a shower, but I’ve got stuff I have to do. Can I drop her down to you?”

“Oh, God…” I heard the breath leak out of her. Geri is our optimist: she still hopes, after twenty years of this, that every time will be the last, that one morning Dina will wake up cured. “Ah, God, the poor little thing. I’d love to take her, but not tonight. Maybe in a couple of days, if she’s still-”

“I can’t wait a couple of days, Geri. I’m on a big case, I’m going to be working eighteen-hour shifts for the foreseeable, and it’s not like I can bring her to work with me.”

“Oh, Mick, I can’t. Sheila’s got the stomach flu, that’s what I was telling you, she’s after giving it to her dad-the two of them were up all night getting sick, if it wasn’t one it was the other-and I’d say Colm and Andrea’ll come down with it any minute. I’ve been cleaning up sick and doing washing and boiling 7-Up all