Richie’s first slip: you don’t make that promise, at least not when you still need leverage. “That’s what we’re trying to make sure of,” I said smoothly, stretching out a hand for the sheet. “Jayden, you’ve been a great help, and it’ll make a big difference. But we need all the help we can get, to keep this guy where he is. Mr. Gogan, Mrs. Gogan: you’ve also had a couple of days to think back and see whether you know something that might help us. Does anything come to mind? Anything you’ve seen, heard, anything out of place? Anything at all?”
There was a silence. The baby started to make small complaining snuffles; Sinead reached out a hand, without looking, and jiggled its cushion till it stopped. Neither she nor Gogan was looking at anyone.
In the end Sinead said, “Can’t think of anything.” Gogan shook his head.
We let the silence grow. The baby wriggled and set up a high, protesting whine; Sinead picked it up and bounced it. Her eyes across its head were cold, flat as her husband’s, defiant.
Finally Richie nodded. “If you think of anything, yous have my card. Meanwhile, do us a favor, yeah? There’s a few newspapers out there that might be interested in Jayden’s story. Keep it to yourselves for a few weeks, OK?”
Sinead went lipless with outrage; obviously she had already been planning her shopping spree and deciding where to get her makeup done for the photo shoot. “We can talk to whoever we like. You can’t stop us.”
Richie said calmly, “The papers’ll still be there in a couple of weeks’ time. When we have this fella sorted, I’ll give you the go-ahead and you can give them a ring. Until then, I’m asking you to do us a favor and not impede our investigation.”
Gogan got the threat, even if she didn’t. He said, “Jayden’ll talk to no one. Is that all, yeah?”
He stood up. “One last thing,” Richie said, “and we’ll be out of your way. Can we borrow your back door key for a minute?”
It opened the Spains’ back door like it had been oiled. The lock clicked open and the last link in that chain clicked into place, a taut glinting thread running from Conor’s hide straight into the violated kitchen. I almost raised a hand to high-five Richie, but he was looking out over the garden wall, at the empty window-holes of the hide, not at me.
“And that’s how the blood smears got on the paving stones,” I said. “He went out the same way he came in.”
Richie’s fidgets had come back; his fingertips were drumming a fast tattoo on the side of his thigh. Whatever was bothering him, the Gogans hadn’t fixed it. He said, “Pat and Jenny. How’d they end up here?”
“What do you mean?”
“Three in the morning, both of them in their pajamas. If they were in bed and Conor came after them, how’d they end up struggling down here? Why not in the bedroom?”
“They caught him on the way out.”
“That’d mean he was only after the kids. Doesn’t fit with the confession: he was all about Pat and Jenny. And wouldn’t they have checked on the kids first thing when they heard noise, stayed trying to help them? Would you care about an intruder getting away, if your kids were in trouble?”
I said, “There’s still plenty about this case that needs explaining. I’m not denying that. But remember, this wasn’t just any intruder. This was their best mate-or their ex-best mate. That could have made a difference to the way things went down. Let’s wait and see what Fiona has to tell us.”
“Yeah,” Richie said. He pushed the door open and cold air swept into the kitchen, stripping away the stagnant layer of blood and chemicals, turning the room, for a breath, fresh and stirring as morning. “Wait and see.”
I found my phone and rang the uniforms-they needed to send down whoever was handy with the padlocks, before the Gogans decided to set up a nice little sideline selling souvenirs. While I waited for someone to pick up, I said to Richie, “That was a good interrogation.”
“Thanks.” He sounded nowhere near as pleased with himself as he should have. “We know why Conor made up that story about finding Pat’s key, anyway. Keep Jayden out of trouble.”
“Sweet of him. Plenty of killers feed stray puppies, too.”
Richie was looking out at the garden, which had already started to take on an abandoned feel-weeds pushing up above the grass, a blue plastic bag left to flap from the bush where it had blown. “Yeah,” he said. “Probably they do.” He slammed the back door-the final rush of cold air fluttered the stray papers left to drift on the floor-and turned the key again.
Gogan was waiting at his front door to get his key back. Jayden was behind him, hanging off the door handle. When Richie handed over the key, Jayden squirmed out, under his father’s arm. “Mister,” he said, to Richie.
“Yeah?”
“If I hadn’t have given your man the key. Would they not have got kilt?”
He was staring up at Richie with real, sharp horror in those pale eyes. Richie said, gently but very firmly, “This wasn’t your fault, Jayden. It’s the fault of the person who did the job. End of story.”
Jayden twisted. “But how would he have got in if he didn’t have the key?”
“He would’ve found a way. Some stuff is gonna find a way to happen; once it’s got started, you can’t stop it, no matter what you do. This whole thing got started a long time before you ever met this fella. Yeah?”
The words slid down my skull, dug in at the back of my neck. I shifted, trying to get Richie moving, but he was focused on Jayden. The kid looked about half convinced. After a moment, he said, “I guess.” He slipped back under his father’s arm and vanished into the dim hall. In the moment before Gogan shut the door, he caught Richie’s eye and gave him a small, reluctant nod.
The two sets of neighbors at the bottom of the road were in, this time. They were the Spains, three days back: young couples, little kids, clean floors and saved-for fashionable touches, houses ready and welcoming for visitors who wouldn’t come. None of them had seen or heard anything. We were discreet about telling them to get their back door locks changed: just a precaution, a possible manufacturing fault we had stumbled on in the course of the investigation, nothing to do with the crime.
One of each couple had a job, long hours and long commutes; the other man had been made redundant a week ago, the other woman back in July. She had tried to make friends with Jenny Spain-“We were both stuck out here all day, I thought it’d be less lonely if we had someone to talk to…” Jenny had been polite, but she had kept her distance: a cup of tea always sounded lovely, but she was never free and never sure when she would be. “I thought maybe she was shy, or she didn’t want me to think we were best friends and start dropping in every day, or maybe she was annoyed because I never tried before-I never had a chance, I was barely even home… But if she was worried about… I mean, was it…? Can I ask?”
She had taken it for granted that it was Pat, just like I had told Richie everyone would. I said, “We have someone in custody in connection with the crime.”
“Oh, God.” Her hand went to her husband’s, on the kitchen table. She was pretty, slim and blond and nicely put together, but she had been crying before we arrived. “Then it wasn’t… It was just… some guy? Like a burglar?”
“The person in custody isn’t a resident of the house.”
That made the tears start leaking out again. “Then… Oh, God…” Her eyes went over my shoulder, to the far end of the kitchen. Their daughter was about four, cross-legged on the floor with her smooth fair head bent over a plush tiger, murmuring away. “Then it could’ve been
Her hand was white-knuckled on her husband’s and she was working hard to hold in a sob. It hurt my jaw, how much I wanted to be able to tell her that she was wrong: that the Spains had sent out some call on the sea wind and Conor had answered, that she and hers had made a life that was safe.
I said, “The suspect is in custody. He’ll be staying that way for a long time.”
She nodded, not looking at me. Her face said I didn’t get it.
The husband said, “We were wanting to get out anyway. We’d have been gone months ago, only who’d buy this? Now…”
The wife said, “We’re not staying here. We’re
The sob broke through. Her voice and her husband’s eyes held the same splinter of helplessness. They both
