understand just how much you cared about all four of them.”
That tic again. “Why?” he asked, the words forcing themselves out against his will. “Why do you think that?”
I rested my elbows on the table and leaned in towards him, my clasped hands next to his, like we were two best mates in the pub having a late-night session of I-love-you-man. “Because,” I said gently, “I understand you. Everything about the Spains, everything about that room you set up, everything you’ve said tonight: all of it tells me what they meant to you. There’s no one in the world who means more, is there?”
His head turned towards me. Those gray eyes were clear as still water, all the night’s tension and turmoil drained away. “No,” he said. “No one.”
“You loved them. Didn’t you?”
A nod.
I said, “Let me tell you the biggest secret I’ve ever learned, Conor. All we really need in life is to make the people we love happy. We can do without anything else; you can live in a cardboard box under a bridge, as long as your woman’s face lights up when you get home to that box in the evening. But if you can’t manage to do that…”
Out of the corner of my eye I saw Richie easing backwards, off the table, leaving the two of us in our circle. Conor said, “Pat and Jenny were happy. The happiest people alive.”
“But then that went, and you couldn’t give it back to them. Probably someone or something out there could have made them happy again, but it wasn’t you. I know exactly what it’s like, Conor: loving someone so much that you’d do anything, you’d rip out your own heart and serve it to them with barbecue sauce if that was what it took to make them OK, but it’s not. It wouldn’t do one fucking bit of good. And what do you do when you realize that, Conor? What can you do? What’s left?”
His hands lay spread on the table, palms upturned, empty. He said, so low I barely heard him: “You wait. All you can do.”
“And the longer you wait, the angrier you get. At yourself, at them, at this whole terrible fucked-up mess of a world. Till you can’t think straight any more. Till you barely know what you’re doing.”
His fingers curled inward, fists tightening.
“Conor,” I said: so softly, words falling weightless as feathers through the hot still air. “Jenny’s been through enough hell for a dozen lifetimes. The last thing I want to do is put her through any more. But if you don’t tell me what happened, then I have to go over to that hospital and make her tell me instead. I’ll have to force her to relive every moment of the other night. Do you think she’s strong enough to take that?”
His head swayed, side to side.
“Neither do I. For all I know, it’ll push her mind so far over the edge that she’ll never find her way back, but I don’t have a choice. You do, Conor. You can save her from that, at least. If you love her, now’s your time to show it. Now’s your time to get it right. You’ll never have another chance.”
Conor vanished, somewhere behind that face as angular and immobile as a mask. His mind was going like a race car again, but he had it under control now, working efficiently and at furious speed. I didn’t breathe. Richie, pressed back against the wall, was still as stone.
Then Conor took a quick breath, ran his hands over his cheeks and turned to look at me. “I broke into their house,” he said, clearly, matter- of-factly, as if he was telling me where he had parked a car. “I killed them. Or thought I had, anyway. Is that what you were after?”
I heard Richie let his breath out, with a tiny unconscious whimper. The hum in my skull rose, screamed like a whirl of diving wasps, and died.
I waited for the rest, but Conor was waiting too: just watching me, with those swollen red-edged eyes, and waiting. Most confessions begin with
I said, “Why?”
He shook his head. “Doesn’t matter.”
“It’s going to matter to the victims’ family. It’s going to matter to the sentencing judge.”
“Not my problem.”
“I’ll need a motive to go in your statement.”
“Make one up. I’ll sign whatever you want.”
Mostly they loosen, after the river’s been crossed. Everything they had went into clinging to their safe bank of lies. Now the current’s ripped them away, buffeted them dizzy and gasping, smashed them down with a tooth- cracking jolt on the far bank, and they think the hard part is over and done with. It leaves them unraveled and boneless; some of them shake uncontrollably, some of them cry, a few can’t stop talking or can’t stop laughing. They haven’t noticed yet that the landscape is different here; that things are transforming around them, familiar faces dissolving, landmarks vanishing into the distance, that nothing will ever be the same again. Conor was different. He was still gathered like a waiting animal, made of concentration. In some way that I couldn’t spot, the battle wasn’t over.
If I got into it with him over the motive, he would win, and you don’t let them win. I said, “How did you get into the house?”
“Key.”
“To which door?”
A splinter of a pause. “Back.”
“Where’d you get that?”
That splinter again, bigger this time. He was being careful. “Found it.”
“When?”
“A while back. Few months, maybe more.”
“Where?”
“Street outside. Pat dropped it.”
I could feel it on my skin, the sideslipping twist to his voice that said
Conor thought that over. “Saw him come in from work in the evening. Later that night, I went for a wander around, spotted the key, figured he had to be the one that lost it.”
Richie wandered over to the table, pulled out a chair facing Conor. “No you didn’t, man. There’s no street lighting. What are you, Superman? See in the dark?”
“It was summer. Bright till late.”
“You were prowling round their gaff while it was still bright? While they were still awake? Come on, man. What were you,
“So maybe it was dawn. I found the key, I got it copied, I got in. End of story.”
I said, “How many times?”
That tiny pause again, while he tested answers in his head. I said crisply, “Don’t waste your time, old son. There’s no point in bullshitting me. We’re well past that. How many times were you in the Spains’ house?”
Conor was rubbing at his forehead with the back of his wrist, trying to hold it together. That sheetrock wall of stubbornness was starting to waver. Adrenaline can only keep you going for so long; any minute now, he was going to be too exhausted to sit up straight. “A few. A dozen, maybe. What’s it matter? I was there night before last. I’ve told you.”
It mattered because he knew his way around the house: even in darkness, he would have been able to find his way up the stairs, into the children’s rooms, to their beds. Richie asked, “Ever take anything away with you?”
I saw Conor dig for the energy to say no, and give up. “Little things, only. I’m not a thief.”
“What kind of stuff?”
“A mug. Handful of rubber bands. A pen. Nothing worth anything.”
I said, “And the knife. Let’s not forget the knife. What did you do with it?”
That should have been one of the tough questions, but Conor turned towards me like he was grateful for it. “Into the sea. The tide was up.”
