out what that was.”
In the interview room, our man knuckled his eyes, stared at his hands like he was looking for blood, or tears. “And I’ll tell you one more thing,” I said. “He feels very emotionally connected to the Spains.”
Richie stopped drawing. “You think? I was thinking it wasn’t personal. The way he kept his distance…”
“No. If he were a professional, he’d be home by now: he’d have clocked that he’s not under arrest, and he’d never even have got into our car. And he isn’t a sociopath who saw them as just random objects that looked like fun, either. The soft kill on the kids, the close-contact kill on the adults, wrecking Jenny’s face… He had feelings for them. He thinks he was close to them. More than likely the only actual interaction they ever had was when Jenny smiled at him in the queue at Tesco; but in his head, at least, there was a connection there.”
Richie breathed on the glass again and went back to his patterns, more slowly this time. “You’re taking it as a definite that he’s our man,” he said. “Yeah?”
I said, “It’s early days to call anything definite.” There was no way to tell him that the drumming in my ears had swelled so high, in the car with this man at my shoulder, I had almost been afraid I would have us off the road. The man permeated the air around him with wrongness, strong and repellent as naphtha, as if he had been soaked in it. “But if you’re asking for my personal opinion, then yes. Hell yes. This is our man.”
The guy raised his head as if he had heard me, and his eyes, rimmed with painful-looking swells of red, skidded around the room. For a second they rested on the one-way glass. Maybe he watched enough cop shows to know what it was; maybe the thing that had fluttered through my skull in the car moved both ways, shrilled like a bat at the back of his neck to warn him I was there. For the first time, his eyes focused, like they were staring straight into mine. He took a quick deep breath and set his jaw, ready.
The tips of my fingers were prickling with how much I wanted to get in there. “We’ll let him wonder for another fifteen minutes,” I said. “Then you go in.”
“Just me?”
“He’ll see you as less of a threat than me. Nearer his age.” And there was the class gap, too: a nice middle- class boy could easily discount an inner-city kid like Richie as some idiot skanger. The lads would have been gobsmacked if they had seen me letting a brand-new newbie loose on this interrogation, but Richie wasn’t quite your ordinary rookie, and this felt like a two-man job. “Just settle him, Richie. That’s all. Find out his name, if you can. Get him a cup of tea. Don’t go anywhere near the case, and for the love of all that’s holy don’t let him ask for a lawyer. I’ll give you a few minutes with him, and then I’ll come in. OK?”
Richie nodded. He said, “You think we’ll get a confession out of him?”
Most of them never confess. You can show them their prints all over the weapon, the victim’s blood all over their clothes and CCTV footage of them whacking her over the head, and they’ll still be spewing out injured innocence and howling about frame-ups. In nine people out of ten, self-preservation goes deeper than sense, deeper than thought. You pray to get the tenth person, the one built with a crack in the self-preservation where something else runs deeper still-the need to be understood, the need to please you, sometimes even conscience. You pray for the one who, somewhere darker than the inside of bone, doesn’t want to save himself; for the one who stands at the top of the cliff and has to fight the urge to leap. Then you find that crack, and you press.
I said, “That’s what we’re aiming for. The Super comes in at nine; that gives us six hours. Let’s have this ready to hand over to him, all wrapped up and tied with a bow.”
Richie nodded again. He pulled off his jacket and three heavy jumpers and dropped them on a chair, leaving him narrow and gangly as a teenager in a long-sleeved navy T-shirt that had been washed thin. He stood at the glass, no fidgeting, and watched the guy hunch lower over the table until I checked my watch and said, “Go.” Then he ran a hand through his hair so it stood up on end, got two cups of water from the cooler, and went.
He did it nicely. He went in holding out a cup and saying, “Sorry, man, I meant to bring this in to you before, only I got caught up… Is that all right for you? Would you have a cup of tea instead, yeah?” His accent had got thicker. The class thing had occurred to him, too.
Our man had jumped half out of his skin when the door opened, and he was still catching his breath. He shook his head.
Richie hovered, looking fifteen. “You sure? Coffee?”
Another head-shake.
“Grand. You’ll let me know if you need more of this, yeah?”
The guy nodded and reached for the water. The chair rocked under his weight. “Ah, hang on,” Richie said. “He’s after giving you the dud chair.” Quick surreptitious glance at the door, like I might be behind it. “Go on: swap over. Have this one.”
Our man shuffled awkwardly across. Probably it made no difference-all the chairs in the interview rooms are chosen to be uncomfortable-but he said, so low I barely heard him, “Thanks.”
“No problem. Detective Richie Curran.” He held out a hand.
Our man didn’t take it. He said, “Do I have to tell you my name?” His voice was low and even, good to listen to, with a slight rough edge like it hadn’t got much use lately. The accent gave me nothing; he could have been from anywhere.
Richie looked surprised. “Do you not want to? Why not?”
After a moment he said, to himself, “… make any difference…” To Richie, with a mechanical handshake: “Conor.”
“Conor what?”
A fraction of a second. “Doyle.” It wasn’t, but that didn’t matter. Come morning we would find either his house or his car, or both, and strip them to the bones looking for, among other things, his ID. All we needed for now was something to call him.
“Nice to meet you, Mr. Doyle. Detective Kennedy’ll be here in a while, then yous can get started.” Richie balanced the edge of his arse on a corner of the table. “I’ll tell you now, I’m only delighted you showed up. I was dying to get out of there, I was. I know people pay good money to go camping up by the sea and all, but the countryside isn’t my style, know what I mean?”
Conor shrugged, a small, jerky movement. “It’s peaceful.”
“I’m not mad about peaceful. City boy, me; give me the noise and the traffic any day. And I was freezing my bollix off, as well. Are you from up there, are you?”
Conor glanced up sharply, but Richie was slugging at his water and watching the door, just making small talk while he waited for me. Conor said, “No one’s from Brianstown. They just move there.”
“That’s what I meant: are you living there, yeah? Jaysus, you couldn’t pay me enough.”
He waited, all mild innocuous curiosity, till Conor said, “No. Dublin.”
Not local. Richie had knocked out one angle and saved us a lot of hassle right there. He raised his cup in a cheerful toast. “Up the Dubs. No better place. And wild horses couldn’t drag us away, amn’t I right?”
Another shrug. “I’d live down the country. Depending.”
Richie hooked an ankle around a spare chair and pulled it over for his feet, getting comfortable for an interesting chat. “Would you, seriously? Depending on what?”
Conor wiped a palm up his jaw, hard, trying to pull it together: Richie was nudging him off balance, poking little holes in his concentration. “Dunno. If you had a family. Space for the kids to play.”
“Ah,” Richie said, pointing a finger at him. “There you go, see. I’m a single man: I need somewhere I can get a few drinks in, meet a few girls. Can’t live without that, know what I mean?”
I had been right to send him in. He was relaxed as a sunbather and doing a beautiful job. I was willing to bet that Conor had gone into that room with the intention of keeping his lip firmly zipped, for years if necessary. Every detective, even Quigley, has knacks, little things that he does better than anyone else around: we all know who to call if we want a witness reassured by the expert, or a quick bit of intimidation done right. Richie had one of the rarest knacks of all. He could make a witness believe, against all the evidence, that they were just two people talking, the same way the two of us had talked while we waited in that hide; that Richie was seeing not a solve in the making, not a bad guy who needed locking up for the good of society, but another human being. It was good to know.
Conor said, “That gets old, the going out. You stop wanting it.”
Richie’s hands went up. “Take your word for that, man. What do you start wanting instead?”
“Something to come home to. A wife. Kids. A bit of peace. The simple stuff.”
It moved through his voice, slow and heavy, like a shadow looming under dark water: grief. For the first time, I
