Broken Harbour

her back to my place or Geri’s. That was all she wanted, deep down: to be found and brought home.

I got up early, showered, shaved, made some breakfast and a lot of coffee. I didn’t ring Dina. Four times I had a text half typed, but I deleted them all. On my way to work I didn’t detour past her flat, or risk crashing the car while I craned my neck at every slim dark-haired girl I passed: if she wanted me, she knew how to find me. My own daring left me breathless. My hands felt shaky, but when I looked at them on the wheel they were steady and strong.

Richie was already at his desk, with his phone clamped to his ear, swinging his chair back and forth and listening to perky hold music loud enough that I could hear it too. “Pest-control companies,” he said, nodding at a printout in front of him. “Tried all the numbers Pat got off the discussion board: no joy. This here, this is every exterminator in Leinster, so we’ll see what shows up.”

I sat down and picked up my phone. “If you get nothing, we can’t assume that means there’s nothing to get. A lot of people out there are working off the books these days. If someone didn’t declare a job to the Revenue, you think he’s going to declare it to us?”

Richie started to say something, but then the hold music cut out and he swung around to his desk. “Good morning, this is Detective Garda Richard Curran, I’m looking for some information…”

No message from Dina-not that I had expected one, she didn’t even have my work number, but a part of me had been hoping anyway. One from Dr. Dolittle and his dreadlocks, saying he had checked out the home-and-garden board and, whoa, some mad shit there or what? According to him, the lined-up skeletons sounded like something a mink would be into, but the idea of an abandoned exotic pet was also way cool, and there were totally guys out there who would smuggle in a wolverine and worry about the pet-care angle later. He was planning to have a wander around Brianstown over the weekend and see if he could find any signs of “something fun.” And a message from Kieran, who at eight on a Friday morning had already started pumping his world full of drum and bass, telling me to call him.

Richie hung up, shook his head at me and started dialing again. I rang Kieran back.

“Kemosabe! Hang on there.” A pause, while the music went down to a volume that meant he barely even had to shout. “I checked out your guy Pat-the-lad’s account on that home-and-garden board: no private messages, in or out. He could have deleted them, but to check that out, we’d need a subpoena to the site owners. Basically, that’s what I called to tell you: we’re running out of road here. The recovery software’s finished doing its thing, and we’ve checked out everything it gave us. No more posts about weasels or whatever, anywhere that’s in the computer history. Literally the most interesting thing we’ve got is some idiot forwarding Jenny Spain an e-mail about non-nationals kidnapping a kid in a shopping center and cutting its hair in the jacks, which is only interesting because it’s like the world’s oldest urban legend and I can’t believe people actually still fall for it? If you really want to know what was living in your guy’s attic, and you figure he told the net, then your next step is to put in a request to the vics’ service provider and keep your fingers crossed they hold info on visited sites.”

Richie hung up again; he kept one hand on the phone, but instead of redialing he watched me, waiting. “We don’t have time for that,” I said. “We’ve got less than two days to charge Conor Brennan or release him. Anything on his computer that I should know about?”

“Not so far. No links to the vics-none of the same websites, no e-mails to or from. And I’m not seeing any deletions over the last few days, so it’s not like he wiped the good stuff when he knew we were coming-unless he wiped it so well I can’t even see that, and excuse me if this sounds arrogant but I don’t think so? Basically, he’s barely even touched his machine in the last six months. Occasionally he checked his e-mail, he did some design upkeep on a couple of websites, and he watched a bunch of National Geographic animal documentaries online, but that’s about it. Real thrill seeker, this guy.”

“Right,” I said. “Keep looking through the Spains’ computer. And keep me posted.”

I could hear the shrug in Kieran’s voice. “Sure, Kemosabe. One needle in a haystack coming up. Catch you later.”

For a treacherous second I thought of leaving it. Whatever else Pat had said about his vermin problem, out there in cyberspace, what difference did it make? All it would do was give people yet another excuse to write him off as some nutter. But Richie was watching me, hopeful as a puppy watching his leash, and I had promised. “Stay on that,” I said, nodding at the pest-control list. “I’ve got an idea.”

Even under stress, Pat had been an organized guy, efficient. In his place, I wouldn’t have bothered to re-type my whole saga when I switched discussion boards. Pat might not have been a computer genius, by Kieran’s standards, but I was willing to bet he had known how to copy and paste.

I pulled up his original posts, the Wildwatcher one and the home-and-garden one, and started pasting sentences into Google. It only took four tries before a post by Pat-the-lad came up.

“Richie,” I said. He was already scooting his chair over to my desk.

The website was an American one, a forum for hunters. Pat had shown up there on the last of July, almost two weeks after he flamed out on the home-and-garden site: he had spent a while licking his wounds, or searching for the right place, or it had just taken that long for his need for help to reach a pitch he couldn’t ignore.

Not much had changed. I hear it most days but no real pattern-sometimes could be 4/5 times in a day/night, sometimes nothing for 24 hours. Have had a video baby monitor rigged up in the attic for a while now but no joy-am wondering if maybe the animal’s actually in the space between the attic floor/the ceiling underneath-tried to check w torch but can’t see anything. So I’m planning to leave the attic hatch open and point another video monitor at the opening, see if this thing gets ballsy + decides to go exploring. (I’ll put chicken wire over the hatch so it doesn’t show up on one of my kids pillow, don’t worry, I’m not totally mental… yet anyway!)

“Hang on,” Richie said. “Back on that home-and-garden site, Pat went apeshit about how he didn’t want Jenny knowing any of this; he didn’t want her scared. Remember? Now, but, he’s putting up that monitor on the landing. How was he planning on hiding that from her?”

“Maybe he wasn’t. Married couples do talk occasionally, old son. Maybe Pat and Jenny had a good heart-to- heart somewhere along the way, and she knew all about the thing in the attic.”

“Yeah,” Richie said. One of his knees had started jiggling. “Maybe.”

But since the first monitor hasn’t been a big success I was wondering if anyone has any other ideas? Like species it could be or bait it might go for? PLEASE for Christ’s sake don’t tell me to use poison or get an exterminator or any of that shit because those are out, end of story. Apart from that any ideas welcome!!!

The hunters gave him the usual list of suspects, this time with a heavy slant towards mink-they agreed with Dr. Dolittle about the lined-up skeletons. When it came to solutions, though, they were a lot more hard-core than the other boards. Within a few hours, one guy had told Pat: OK so fuck this mousetrap bullshit. Time to grow a pair and break out the serious weaponry. What you need here is a real trap. Check this out.

The link went to a site like a trapper’s candy store, pages and pages of traps aimed at everything from mice to bear and everyone from animal lovers to full-on sadists, each one described in loving, semi-comprehensible jargon. Three choices. 1. You can go for a live trap, the ones that look like wire cages. Won’t hurt your target. 2. Go for a foothold trap, the one you probly picture from the movies. Will hold your target till you get back to it. Watch out though. Depending what you’ve got, the animal could make a lot of noise. If that would bug your wife or kids then maybe forget it. 3. Go for a Conibear trap. Breaks the target’s neck, kills it pretty much right away. Whatever you pick you want like a four inch jaw spread. Good luck. Watch your fingers.

Pat came back sounding a lot happier: again, the prospect of a plan had made all the difference. Man thanks a mil, you’re saving my arse here, I owe you big time. Think I’m going to go w the foothold-sounds weird but I don’t want to kill this thing, at least not till I’ve had a good look at it, I’ve got a right to come face to face with it after all this. At the same time though after all the hassle it’s given me, I don’t feel like going all out to make sure I don’t hurt a hair on its precious little head! To be honest I’m like fuck it, I’ve spent long enough taking shit from this thing, now its my turn to give it some shit for a change and I’m not going to waste my chance right?

Richie’s eyebrows were up. He said, “Lovely.”

I almost wished I had given in to temptation and left this whole thing to Kieran. I said, “Trappers use leghold traps all the time. It doesn’t make them psycho sadists.”