Broken Harbour

“Sure you do. You’ve been keeping something back ever since we first walked in here. Today is when you come clean. What was it, Mrs. Gogan? Something you saw? Heard? What?”

“I don’t know anything about that fella. I never even seen him.”

“That’s not what I asked you. I don’t care if it’s got nothing to do with that fella, or any fella; I want to hear it anyway. Sit down.”

I saw Sinead consider going into a don’t-give-me-orders-in-my-own-house routine, but I gave her a stare that said this would be a very bad idea. In the end she rolled her eyes and plumped down on the sofa, which groaned. “I’ve to get Baby up in a minute. And I don’t know anything that’s got to do with anything. OK?”

“You don’t get to decide that. The way it works is, you tell us what you know; we figure out how it’s relevant. That’s why we’re the ones with the badges. So let’s go.”

She sighed noisily. “I. Don’t. Know. Anything. What am I supposed to say?”

I said, “Just how stupid are you?”

Sinead’s face turned uglier and she opened her mouth to hit me with some stale drivel about respect, but I kept slamming the words at her till she shut it again. “You make me want to puke. What the hell do you think we’re investigating? Shoplifting? Littering? This is a murder case. Multiple murder. How has that not sunk into your thick head?”

“Don’t you call me-”

“Tell me something, Mrs. Gogan. I’m curious. What kind of scum lets a kid-killer walk away because she doesn’t like cops? Just how far below human do you have to be, to think that’s OK?”

Sinead snapped, “Are you going to let him talk to me like that?”

She was talking to Richie. He spread his hands. “We’re under a load of pressure here, Mrs. Gogan. You’ve seen the papers, yeah? The whole country’s looking for us to get this sorted. We’ve got to do whatever it takes.”

“No shit,” I said. “Why did you think we kept coming back? Because we can’t stay away from your pretty face? We’re here because we’ve got a guy in custody, and we need the evidence to keep him there. Think hard, if you’re able. What do you figure is going to happen if he gets out?”

Sinead had her arms folded across her flab and her lips pinched into a tight, outraged knot. I didn’t wait. “The first thing is that I’m going to be very bloody pissed off, and even you have to know that pissing off a cop is a bad idea. Does your husband ever do the odd job for cash, Mrs. Gogan? Do you know how long he could get for welfare fraud? Jayden doesn’t look sick to me; how often does he skip school? If I put in the effort-and believe me, I will- just how much trouble do you think I could make for you?”

“We’re a decent family-”

“Save it. Even if I believed you, I’m not your biggest problem. The second thing that’s going to happen, if you keep messing us around, is that this guy is going to get out. God knows I don’t expect you to give a damn about justice or the good of society, but I thought at least you had the brains to look after your own family. This man knows that Jayden could tell us about the key. Do you think he doesn’t know where Jayden lives? If I tell him that someone’s got the goods on him and they could talk any minute, who do you think is going to spring to his mind?”

“Ma,” Jayden said, in a small voice. He had bum-shuffled back against the sofa and was staring at me. I could feel Richie’s head turned towards me, too, but he had the sense to keep his mouth shut.

“Is all of this clear enough for you? Do you need me to explain it in smaller words? Because unless you’re literally too stupid to live, the next thing out of your mouth is going to be whatever you’ve been keeping back.”

Sinead was pressed back into the sofa, mouth hanging open. Jayden was holding on to the hem of her leggings. The fear on their faces brought back last night’s giddy, tilting rush, sent it speeding through my blood like a drug with no name.

I don’t talk to witnesses this way. My bedside manner may not be the finest, I may have a rep for being cold or brusque or whatever people want to call it, but I had never in my career done anything like this. It wasn’t because I hadn’t wanted to. Don’t fool yourself: we all have a cruel streak. We keep it under lock and key either because we’re afraid of getting punished or because we believe this will somehow make a difference, make the world a better place. No one punishes a detective for giving a witness a little scare. I’ve heard plenty of the lads do worse, and nothing ever happened.

I said, “Talk.”

“Ma.”

Sinead said, “It was that yoke there.” She nodded at the baby monitor, lying on its side on the coffee table.

“What was?”

“Sometimes they get their wires crossed, or whatever you call it.”

“Frequencies,” Jayden said. He looked a lot happier, now that his mother was talking. “Not wires.”

“You shut up. This is all your fault, you and your bleeding tenner.” Jayden shoved himself away from her, along the floor, and slumped into a sulk. “Whatever you call them, they get crossed. Sometimes-not all the time; maybe every couple of weeks, like-that yoke picked up their monitor, instead of ours. So we could hear what was going on in there. It wasn’t on purpose or nothing, I don’t be listening in on people”-Sinead managed a self-righteous look that didn’t suit her-“but we couldn’t help hearing.”

“Right,” I said. “And what did you hear?”

“I told you, I don’t be earwigging on other people’s conversations. I paid no notice. Just switched the monitor off and then on again, to reset it. I only ever heard a few seconds, like.”

“You listened for ages,” said Jayden. “You made me turn down my game so you could hear better.”

Sinead shot him a glare that said he was in deep shit as soon as we left. For this, she had been ready to let a murderer walk free: so she could look like a good respectable housewife, to herself if not to us, instead of a nosy, petty, furtive little bitch. I’d seen it a hundred times, but it made me want to slap the fourth-hand look of virtue right off her ugly face. I said, “I don’t give a damn if you spent your days under the Spains’ window with an ear trumpet. I just want to know what you heard.”

Richie said matter-of-factly, “Anyone would’ve listened, sure. Human nature. At first you’d no choice, anyway: you needed to figure out what was going on with your monitor.” His voice had that ease again: he was back on form.

Sinead nodded vigorously. “Yeah. Exactly. The first time it happened, I nearly had a heart attack. Middle of the night, all of a sudden there’s a kid calling, ‘Mummy, Mummy, come here,’ right in my ear. First I thought it was Jayden, only it sounded way too young, and he doesn’t call me Mummy anyway; and Baby was only born. Scared the life out of me.”

“She screamed,” Jayden told us, smirking. He had apparently recovered. “She thought it was a ghost.”

“I did, yeah. So? My husband woke up then, and he figured it out, but anyone would’ve been freaking. So what?”

“She was going to get a psychic out. Or one of those ghost hunters.”

“You shut up.”

I said, “When was this?”

“Baby’s ten months now, so January, February.”

“And after that you heard it every couple of weeks, for a total of about twenty times. What did you hear?”

Sinead was still furious enough to glass me, but a gossip about the uppity neighbors was impossible to resist. “Mostly just boring sh- stuff. The first few times, it was himself reading some story to put one of the kids to sleep, or it was the young fella jumping on his bed, or the young one talking to her dollies. Around the end of summer, but, they must’ve moved the monitors downstairs or something, ’cause we started hearing other stuff. Like them watching the telly, or her showing the young one how to make chocolate chip cookies- wouldn’t just buy them from the shop like the rest of us, she was too good for that. And once-middle of the night again-I heard her say, ‘Just come to bed. Please,’ like she was begging, and him saying, ‘In a minute.’ Didn’t blame him; it’d be like shagging a bag of potatoes.” Sinead tried to catch Richie’s eye for a shared smirk, but he stayed blank. “Like I said. Boring.”

I said, “And the ones that weren’t boring?”

“There was only the once.”

“Let’s hear it.”

“It was one afternoon. She was just after getting in, I guess from picking up the young one from school. We