Broken Harbour

Then he takes the weapons and dumps them, so it’ll look like an intruder.”

I took a second and a breath, to make sure I wouldn’t bite his head off. “Well, it’s a pretty little fairy story, old son. Poignant, is that the word I’m looking for? And that’s all it is. It’s fine as far as it goes, but you’re skipping right past this: why the holy hell did Conor confess?”

“Because. What happened in there.” Richie nodded at the glass. “Man, you practically told him you were going to put Jenny Spain in a straitjacket if he didn’t give you what you were after.”

I said, and my voice was cold enough to warn a much stupider man than Richie, “Do you have a problem with the way I’m doing my job, Detective?”

His hands went up. “I’m not picking holes. I’m only saying: that’s why he confessed.”

“No, Detective. No, it bloody well isn’t. He confessed because he did it. All that crap I gave him about loving Jenny, all that did was pick the lock; it didn’t put anything behind the door that wasn’t already fucking there. Maybe your experience has been different from mine, maybe you’re just better at this job, but I have a hard enough time getting my suspects to confess to what they did. I can safely say I’ve never, in all my career, managed to get one of them to confess to something he didn’t do. If Conor Brennan says he’s our man, then it’s because he is.”

“He’s not like most of them, though, is he? You said it yourself, we’ve both been saying: he’s different. There’s something weird going on there.”

“He’s weird, yeah. He’s not Jesus. He’s not here to give his life for Pat Spain’s sins.”

Richie said, “It’s not just him that’s weird. What about the baby monitors? Those weren’t your man Conor’s doing. And the holes in the walls? There was something going on inside that house.”

I leaned back against the wall with a thump and folded my arms. It might have been just the fatigue, or the thin yellowy-gray dawn smearing the window, but that champagne fizz of victory was well and truly gone. “Tell me, old son: why the hate for Pat Spain? Is this some kind of chip on your shoulder, because he was a good solid pillar of the community? Because if it is, I’m warning you now: get rid of it, sharpish. You’re not always going to be able to find a nice middle-class boy to pin things on.”

Richie came at me fast, finger pointing; for a second I thought he was going to jab me in the chest, but he had enough sense left to stop himself. “It’s got nothing to do with class. Nothing. I’m a cop, man. Same as yourself. I’m not some thicko skanger you brought in as a favor because it’s Take A Knacker To Work Day.”

He was too close and much too angry. I said, “Then act like a cop. Step back, Detective. Get a grip on yourself.”

Richie stared me out of it for another second; then he wheeled away, flung himself back against the glass and shoved his hands deep into his pockets. “You tell me, man: why are you so dead set that it isn’t Patrick Spain? Why the love?”

I had no obligation to explain myself to some jumped-up little newbie, but I wanted to; I wanted to say it, shove it deep into Richie’s head. “Because,” I said, “Pat Spain followed the rules. He did everything people are supposed to do. That’s not how killers live. I told you from the start: things like this don’t come out of nowhere. All that crap the families give the media-‘Oh, I can’t believe he would do this, he’s such a Boy Scout, never done anything bad in his life, they were the happiest couple in the world’-that’s garbage. Every time, Richie, every single time, it turns out that the guy was a Boy Scout except for a record as long as your arm, or he’d never done anything bad except for his little habit of terrorizing the shit out of his wife, or they were the happiest couple in the world except for the minor fact that he was banging her sister. There’s not one hint, anywhere, that any of that applied to Pat. You’re the one who said it: the Spains did their best. Pat was a trier. He was one of the good guys.”

Richie didn’t move. “Good guys break.”

“Seldom. Very, very seldom. And there’s a reason for that. It’s because the good guys have stuff to hold them in place, when the going gets tough. They’ve got jobs, families, responsibilities. They’ve got the rules they’ve been following their whole lives. I’m sure all that stuff sounds uncool to you, but here’s the fact: it works. Every day, it keeps people from crossing over the line.”

“So,” Richie said flatly, “because Pat was a nice middle-class boy. A pillar of the community. That’s why he couldn’t be a killer.”

I didn’t want to have this argument, not in an airless observation room at some ungodly hour of the morning with sweat sticking my shirt to my back. I said, “Because he had things to love. He had a home-OK, it was in the arsehole of nowhere, but one look at it should have told you that Pat and Jenny loved every inch of the place. He had the woman he’d been loving ever since they were sixteen; still mad about each other, that’s what Brennan said. He had two kids who climbed all over him. That’s what holds the good guys together, Richie. They’ve got places to put their hearts into. They’ve got people to take care of. People to love. That’s what stops them from going over the edge, when a guy who wasn’t weighted down would be in free fall. And you’re trying to convince me that Pat just turned around one day and blew all that away, for no reason at all.”

“Not for no reason. You said yourself: he could’ve been about to lose the lot. The job was gone, the gaff was going; the wife and kids could’ve been about to go as well. It happens. All over this country, it’s been happening. The triers are the ones that snap, when trying doesn’t do any good.”

All of a sudden I was exhausted, two sleepless nights digging their claws in and dragging me down with all their weight. I said, “The one who snapped was Conor Brennan. Now there’s a man who’s got nothing left to lose: no work, no home, no family, not even his own mind. I’ll bet you any amount of money you want, when we start looking into his life we’re not going to find a close-knit circle of friends and loved ones. Nothing’s holding Brennan in place. He’s got nothing to love; nothing except the Spains. He’s spent the last year living like some kind of cross between a hermit and the Unabomber, all so he could stalk them. Even your own little theory hinges on the fact that Conor was a delusional freak show who was spying on them at three in the bloody morning. The guy’s not right, Richie. He’s not OK. There’s no way around that.”

Behind Richie, in the harsh white light of the interview room, Conor had put down the pen and was pressing his fingertips into his eyes, rubbing them in a grim, relentless rhythm. I wondered how long it had been since he had slept. “Remember what we talked about? The simplest solution? It’s sitting behind you. If you find evidence that Pat was a vicious sonofabitch who was beating the shit out of his family while he got ready to leave them for a Ukrainian lingerie model, then come back to me. Until then, I’m putting my money on the psycho stalker.”

Richie said, “You told me yourself: ‘psycho’ isn’t a motive. All that about being upset because the Spains weren’t happy, that’s nothing. They’d been in trouble for months. You’re telling me the other night he just decided out of the blue, so fast he didn’t even have time to clean out his hide: There’s nothing on the telly, I know what I’ll do, I’ll head on down to the Spains’ and kill the lot of them? Come on, man. Here’s you saying Pat Spain didn’t have a motive. What the hell was this fella’s motive? Why the hell would he want any of them dead?”

One of the many ways that murder is the unique crime: it’s the only one that makes us ask why. Robbery, rape, fraud, drug dealing, all the filthy litany, they come with their filthy explanations built in; all you have to do is slot the perp into the perp-shaped hole. Murder needs an answer.

Some detectives don’t care. Officially, they’re right: if you can prove whodunit, nothing in the law says you need to prove why. I care. When I pulled what looked like a random drive-by, I spent weeks-after we had the shooter in custody, after we had enough evidence to sink him ten times over-having in-depth conversations with every monosyllabic cop-hating lowlife in his shit-hole neighborhood, until someone let slip that the victim’s uncle worked in a shop and had refused to sell the shooter’s twelve-year-old sister a packet of cigarettes. The day we stop asking why, the day we decide that it’s acceptable for the answer to a severed life to be Just because, is the day we step away from that line across the cave entrance and invite the wild to come howling in.

I said, “Trust me: I’m going to find out. We’ve got Brennan’s associates to talk to, we’ve got his flat to search, we’ve got the Spains’ computer-and Brennan’s, if he’s got one-to go through, we’ve got forensic evidence waiting to be analyzed… Somewhere in there, Detective, there’s a motive. Forgive me if I don’t have every piece of the puzzle in place within forty-eight hours of getting the bloody case, but I promise you, I will find them. Now let’s get this fucking statement and go home.”

I headed for the door, but Richie stayed put. He said, “Partners. That’s what you said this morning, remember?