She was alive, which counted for a lot to me and which I felt should count for at least something to her, but before I could point that out, my mobile rang. As I went for it, I checked my watch: nine on the dot, good man Richie. “Kennedy,” I said, getting up and moving away from Dina.
“We’re in place,” Richie said, so softly I had to press my ear to the phone. “No movement.”
“Techs and floaters doing their thing?”
“Yeah.”
“Any problems? Run into anyone along the way? Anything I should know?”
“Nah. We’re good.”
“Then we’ll talk in an hour, or sooner if there’s any action. Good luck.”
I hung up. Dina was twisting the towel into a tight knot and watching me sharply, through that wing of glossy hair. “Who was that?”
“Work.” I pocketed the mobile, inside pocket. Dina’s mind has paranoid corners. I didn’t want her hiding my phone so that I couldn’t discuss her with imaginary hospitals, or, even better, answering it and telling Richie that she knew what he was up to and she hoped he died of cancer.
“I thought you were off.”
“I am. More or less.”
“What’s ‘more or less’ supposed to mean?”
Her hands were starting to tense up on the towel. I said, keeping my voice easy, “It means that sometimes people need to ask me something. There’s no such thing as ‘off ’ in Murder. That was my partner. He’ll probably ring a few more times tonight.”
“Why?”
I got my coffee mug and headed for the kitchen to top up. “You saw him. He’s a rookie. Before he makes any big decisions, he needs to check with me.”
“Big decisions about what?”
“Anything.”
Dina started using one thumbnail to pick at a scab on the back of her other hand, in short hard scrapes. “Someone was listening to the radio this afternoon,” she said. “In work.”
Oh, shit. “And?”
“And. It said there was a dead body, and police were treating the death as suspicious. It said Broken Harbor. They had some guy talking, some cop. It sounded like you.”
And then the freezer had started making forest-fire noises. I said carefully, taking a seat in my armchair again, “OK.”
The scraping picked up force. “Don’t
“Do what?”
“Put on that face, that stupid poker-up-your-arse cop face. Talk like I’m some idiot witness you can play little games with because I’m too intimidated to call you on it. You don’t intimidate me. Do you get that?”
There was no point in arguing. I said calmly, “Got it. I’m not going to try to intimidate you.”
“Then stop fucking about and
“You know I can’t discuss work. It’s not personal.”
“
She was jammed tight into her corner of the sofa, feet braced like she was getting ready to come flying at me, which was unlikely but not impossible. I said, “True enough. I meant I’m not hiding anything from you personally. I have to be discreet with everyone.”
Dina chewed at the back of her forearm and watched me like I was her enemy, narrowed eyes alight with cold animal cunning. “OK,” she said. “So let’s just watch the news.”
I had been hoping that wouldn’t occur to her. “I thought you liked the peace and quiet.”
“If it’s public enough that the whole damn country can see it, surely to jumping Jesus it can’t be too confidential for me to watch. Right? Considering that it’s not
“For God’s sake, Dina. I’ve been in work all day. The last thing I want to do is come home and look at work on TV.”
“Then tell me
“All right,” I said, hands going up. “OK. I’ll give you the story, if you’ll calm down for me. That means you need to stop biting your arm.”
“It’s my bloody arm. What do you care whose business is it?”
“I can’t concentrate while you’re doing that. And as long as I can’t concentrate, I can’t tell you what’s going on. It’s up to you.”
She shot me a defiant glare, bared small white teeth and bit down once more, hard, but when I didn’t react she wiped her arm on her T-shirt and sat on her hands. “There. Happy?”
I said, “It wasn’t just one body. It was a family of four. They were living out in Broken Harbor-it’s called Brianstown now. Someone broke into their house last night.”
“How’d he kill them?”
“We won’t be sure till the post-mortem. It looks like he used a knife.”
Dina stared at nothing and didn’t move, didn’t even breathe, while she thought that over. “Brianstown,” she said finally, abstractedly. “What a stupid fucking cretin name. Whoever came up with that, someone should push his head underneath a lawn mower and hold it there. Are you positive?”
“About the name?”
“No! Je-
I rubbed at the hinge of my jaw, trying to work some of the tension out of it. “Yeah. I’m positive.”
The focus had come back into her eyes: they were on me, unblinking. “You’re positive because you’re working on it.”
I didn’t answer.
“You said you didn’t want to look at it on the news because you’d been working on it all day. That’s what you said.”
“Looking at a murder case is work. Any murder case. That’s what I
“Blah blah blah whatever,
“What difference does that make?”
“It makes a difference because if you tell me, I’ll let you change the subject.”
I said, “Yeah. I’m on the case. Me and a bunch of other detectives.”
“Hmm,” Dina said. She threw the towel in the general direction of the bathroom door, slid off the sofa and started moving around the room again, forceful automatic circles. I could almost hear the hum of the thing that lives inside her starting to build, a thin mosquito whine.
I said, “And now we change the subject.”
“Yeah,” Dina said. She picked up a little soapstone elephant that Laura and I brought back from holiday in Kenya one year, squeezed it hard and examined the red dents it left in her palm with interest. “I was thinking, before. While I was waiting for you. I want to change my flat.”
“Good,” I said. “We can go look for something online right now.” Dina’s flat is a shit hole. She could afford a perfectly decent place, I help her with the rent, but she says purpose-built apartment blocks make her want to bang her head off the walls, so she always ends up in some decrepit Georgian house that was converted into bedsits in the sixties, sharing a bathroom with some hairy loser who calls himself a musician and needs regular reminders that she has a cop for a brother.
“No,” Dina said. “
