Broken Harbour

were in here, Baby was having his nap so I’d the monitor out, and all of a sudden there’s your woman, yapping away. I almost switched it off, ’cause I swear she’d make you sick, but…”

Sinead gave a defiant little shrug. I said, “What was Jennifer Spain saying?”

“Talking her head off. She’s like, ‘Now let’s get ready! Your daddy’s going to be home from his walk any minute, and when he gets in, we’re going to be happy. Very very happy.’ She’s all perky”-Sinead’s lip curled-“like some American cheerleader. Don’t know what she had to be perky about. She’s, like, arranging the kids, telling the little girl to sit right here and have a dolly picnic, and the young fella to sit over here and not be throwing his Lego, ask nicely if he wants a hand. She goes, ‘Everything’s going to be lovely. When your daddy gets in, he’s going to be sooo happy. That’s what you want, isn’t it? You don’t want Daddy to be unhappy, do you?’”

“‘Mummy and Daddy,’” said Jayden, under his breath, and snorted.

“She was going on like that for ages, till the monitor cut out. See what I mean about her? She was like your woman off Desperate Housewives, the one that has to have everything perfect or she loses the head. It was like, Jaysus, relax. My husband goes, ‘D’you know what that one needs? She needs a good-’”

Sinead remembered who she was talking to and cut herself off, with a stare to show she wasn’t afraid of us. Jayden sniggered.

“To be honest with you,” she said, “she sounded bleeding mental.”

I asked, “When was this?”

“A month back, maybe. Middle of September. See what I mean? Nothing to do with anything.”

Not like anyone off Desperate Housewives; like a victim. Like every battered woman and man I had dealt with, back in Domestic Violence. Every one of them had been sure that their partners would be happy and everything in the garden would be rosy, if they could just get it right. Every one of them had been terrified, to a point somewhere between hysteria and paralysis, of getting it wrong and making Daddy unhappy.

Richie had gone still, no more foot-jiggling: he had spotted it too. He said, “That’s why the first thing you thought, when you saw our lot outside, was that Pat Spain had killed his wife.”

“Yeah. I thought maybe if she didn’t have the house clean, or if the kids were bold, he gave her the slaps. Just goes to show you, doesn’t it? There she was, all up herself, with her fancy gear and her posh accent, and all the time he’s beating the bollix out of her.” Sinead couldn’t keep the smirk off the corners of her mouth. She had liked the idea. “So when yous showed up, I figured it had to be that. She burned the dinner or something, and he went ballistic.”

Richie asked, “Anything else that made you think he could be hurting her? Anything you heard, anything you saw?”

“Those monitors being downstairs. That’s weird, know what I mean? At first I couldn’t think of any reason why they’d be anywhere but the kids’ bedrooms. When I heard her going on like that, though, I thought maybe he put them all around, so he could keep tabs on her. Like if he went upstairs or out in the garden, he could bring the receivers with him, so he’d hear everything she did.” Satisfied little nod: she was delighted with her own investigative genius. “Creepy or what?”

“Nothing else, no?”

Shrug. “No bruises or nothing. No yelling, that I heard. She did have a face on her, but, whenever I saw her outside. She used to be all cheerful-even when the kids were acting up or whatever, she’d this big fake smile on her. That went out the window, the last while: she looked down in the dumps the whole time. Spacy, like-I thought maybe she was on the Valium. I figured it was ’cause of him being out of work: she wasn’t happy about having to live like the rest of us, no more SUV and no more designer gear. If he was battering her, though, could’ve been that.”

I asked, “Did you ever hear anyone else in the house, other than the four Spains? Visitors, family, tradesmen?”

That lit up Sinead’s whole pasty face. “Jesus! Was your woman playing away, yeah? Getting some fella in while her husband was out? No wonder he was keeping tabs. The cheek of her, acting like we were something she’d scrape off her shoe, when she was-”

I said, “Did you hear or see anything that would indicate that?”

She thought that over. “Nah,” she said, regretfully. “Only ever heard the four of them.”

Jayden was messing about with his controller, flicking at buttons, but he didn’t quite have the nerve to switch it back on. “The whistling,” he said.

“That was some other house.”

“Wasn’t. They’re too far away.”

I said, “We’d like to hear about it, either way.”

Sinead shifted on the sofa. “It was only the one time. August, maybe; could’ve been before. Early morning. We heard someone whistling-not a song or nothing, just like when a fella whistles to himself while he’s doing something else.” Jayden demonstrated, a low, tuneless, absent sound. Sinead shoved his shoulder. “Stop that. You’re giving me a headache. Them in Number Nine, they were all gone out-her too, so it couldn’t have been her bit on the side. I thought it had to be from one of them houses down at the end of the road; there’s two families down there, and they’ve both got kids, so they’d have the monitors.”

“No you didn’t,” Jayden said. “You thought it was a ghost. Again.”

Sinead snapped, to me or Richie or both, “I’m entitled to think what I like. Yous can go ahead and look at me like I’m thick; yous don’t have to live out here. Try it for a while, then come back to me.”

Her voice was belligerent, but there was real fear in her eyes. “We’ll bring our own Ghostbusters,” I said. “Monday night, did you hear anything on the monitors? Anything at all?”

“Nah. Like I said, it only happened every few weeks.”

“You’d better be sure.”

“I am. Positive.”

“What about your husband?”

“Him neither. He’d have said.”

I said, “Is that the lot? Nothing else we might want to hear about?”

Sinead shook her head. “That’s it.”

“How do I know that?”

“’Cause. I don’t want yous coming back here again, calling me names in front of my son. I’ve told you everything. So you can eff off and leave us alone. OK?”

“My pleasure,” I said, getting up. “Believe me.” The arm of the chair left something sticky on my hand; I didn’t bother hiding the look of distaste.

As we left, Sinead planted herself in the doorway behind us, doing something that was meant to be an imposing stare but came off looking like an electrocuted pug dog. When we were a safe distance down the drive, she shouted after us, “You can’t talk to me like that! I’ll be putting in a complaint!”

I pulled my card out of my pocket without breaking stride, waved it above my head and dropped it on the drive for her to pick up. “See you then,” I called back over my shoulder. “I can’t wait.”

I was expecting Richie to say something about my new interview technique-calling a witness a scumbag moron isn’t anywhere in the rule book-but he had sunk back somewhere in his mind; he trudged back to the car with his hands deep in his pockets, head bent into the wind. My mobile had three missed calls and a text, all from Geri-the text started, Sorry mick but any news abt… I deleted them all.

When we got onto the motorway, Richie resurfaced far enough to say-carefully, to the windscreen-“If Pat was hitting Jenny…”

“If my aunt had balls, she’d be my uncle. The Gogan cow doesn’t know everything about the Spains, no matter what she’d like to think. Luckily for us, there’s one guy who does, and we know exactly where to find him.”

Richie didn’t answer. I took one hand off the wheel to give him a clap on the shoulder. “Don’t worry, my friend. We’ll get the goods out of Conor. Who knows, it might even be fun.”

I caught his sideways glance: I shouldn’t have been this upbeat, not after what Sinead Gogan had given us. I didn’t know how to tell him that it wasn’t good humor, not the way he thought; it was that wild rush still careening