Conor was breathing faster, nostrils flaring. “Computer?”
I said, “Let’s skip the part where you play dumb. It’s boring, it’s pointless and it puts me in a very fucking bad mood.” I gave the evidence bag a vicious bounce off the wall. “That OK with you?”
He kept his mouth shut. Richie said, “So let’s go again, yeah? Something changed, to make you leave that yoke for Jenny.” I waved the bag at Conor, between throws. “It was Pat, wasn’t it? He was getting worse.”
“If you already know, what are you asking me for?”
Richie said easily, “Standard procedure, man. We’re just checking that your story matches up with what we’ve got from other sources. If it all fits, then happy days, we believe you. If you’re telling us one thing and the evidence is telling us another…” He shrugged. “Then we’ve got a problem, and we’ve got to keep digging till we sort it. You get me?”
After a moment Conor said, “OK. Pat was getting worse. He wasn’t
“But something must’ve happened. Something made you get in touch with Jenny, all of a sudden.”
Conor said simply, “She just looked so lonely. Pat hadn’t said a word to her in, like, two days-not that I saw. He was spending all his time sitting at the kitchen table with those monitors lined up in front of him, just staring. She’d tried to talk to him a couple of times, but he didn’t even look up. Wasn’t like they’d been catching up at night, either: the night before, he’d slept in the kitchen, on that beanbag.”
Conor had been up in that hide practically 24/7, by the end. I stopped playing with the evidence bag and stood still, behind him.
“Jenny… I saw her in the kitchen, waiting for the kettle to boil. Leaning her hands on the countertop, like she was too wrecked to stand up. Staring at nothing. Jack was pulling at her leg, trying to show her something; she didn’t even notice. She looked forty; more. Lost. I almost jumped straight down out of that house, straight over the wall, to put my arms around her.”
I said, keeping it expressionless, “So you decided what she really needed, at this difficult time in her life, was to find out she had a stalker.”
“I was just trying to help. I thought about calling in, or ringing up, or e-mailing her, but Jenny…” He shook his head heavily. “When things aren’t great, she doesn’t want to talk about it. She wouldn’t’ve wanted a chat, not with Pat all… So I just thought: something to let her know I was there. I went home and got the badge. Maybe I called it wrong. Sue me. It seemed like a good idea at the time.”
I asked, “At what time, exactly?”
“What?”
“When did you leave this in the Spains’ house?”
Conor had taken a breath to answer, but something caught him: I saw the sudden stiffening of his shoulders. He said, “I don’t remember.”
“Don’t even try that, chum. It’s not funny any more. When did you leave the badge?”
After a moment Conor said, “Sunday night.”
My eyes met Richie’s, across his head. I said, “This Sunday night just gone.”
“Yeah.”
“What time?”
“Five in the morning, maybe.”
“With all the Spains at home and asleep, a few yards away. I’ll say this for you, chum: you’ve certainly got a pair.”
“I just went in the back door, put it on the counter and left. I waited till Pat had gone to bed-he didn’t stay downstairs that night. No big deal.”
“What about the alarm?”
“I know the code. Watched Pat typing it in.”
Surprise, surprise. “Still,” I said. “It was risky. You must have been pretty desperate to get this done, am I right?”
“I wanted her to have it.”
“Of course you did. And twenty-four hours later, Jenny’s dying and her family’s dead. Don’t even try to tell me that’s a coincidence, Conor.”
“I’m not trying to tell you anything.”
“So what happened? She wasn’t happy with your little present? Wasn’t grateful enough? She shoved it in a drawer instead of wearing it?”
“She put it in her pocket. Don’t know what she did with it after that, and I don’t care. I just wanted her to have it.”
I got both hands on the back of Conor’s chair and said, low and hard and straight into his ear, “You’re so full of shit you make me want to flush your head down the jacks. You know damn well what Jenny thought of the badge. You knew it wasn’t going to scare her, because you put it into her hand yourself. Is that how you were working it, the two of you? She’d sneak downstairs late at night, leave Pat sleeping, and the two of you would fuck on the kids’ beanbag?”
He whipped round to face me, eyes like shards of ice. He wasn’t leaning back away from me, not this time; our faces were almost touching. “You make me sick. If you think that, if you honest to God think that, there’s something wrong with you.”
He wasn’t afraid. It came as a shock: you get used to people being afraid of you, guilty or innocent. Maybe, whether we admit it or not, all of us like it. Conor had no reason left to be afraid of me.
I said, “Fine: so it wasn’t on the beanbag. In your hideout? What are we going to find, when we swab that sleeping bag?”
“You swab away. Knock yourself out. She was never there.”
“Then where, Conor? On the beach? In Pat’s bed? Where did you and Jenny bump your uglies?”
He had his fists clenched on the folds of his jeans to stop himself from punching me. That couldn’t last, and I couldn’t wait. “I’d never have touched her. She’d never have touched me. Never. Are you too thick to get that?”
I laughed in his face. “Of course you would have. Oh, poor little lonely Jenny, stuck out there in that nasty estate: she just needed to know someone cared about her. Isn’t that what you said? You were gagging to be that guy. All that shite about her being sooo lonely, that was just a handy excuse so you could bang her without feeling guilty about Pat. When did it start?”
“Never. You’d do it, then that’s your problem. You’ve never had a real friend, never been in love, then that’s your problem.”
“Some real friend you were. That animal that was sending Pat over the edge: that was you, all along.”
That icy, incredulous stare again. “What are you-”
“How’d you do it? I’m not bothered about the noises-we’re going to trace the place where you bought the sound system, sooner or later-but I’d love to know just how you got the flesh off those squirrels. Knife? Boiling water? Your teeth?”
“I haven’t got a clue what you’re on about.”
“Fine. I’ll let our lab fill me in on the squirrels. Here’s the thing I really want to know: was it just you, this animal? Or was Jenny in on it too?”
Conor shoved back his chair, hard enough that it went tumbling, and stalked off across the room. I went after him so fast I didn’t even feel myself move. My rush backed him against the wall. “You don’t fucking walk away from me. I’m talking to you, sonny boy. When I talk, you fucking listen.”
His face was rigid, a mask carved from hard wood. He was staring past me, eyes narrowed and focused on nothing.
“She was helping you, wasn’t she? Did the two of you have a laugh about it, up in your little hideout? That eejit Pat, that sucker, falling for every piece of crap you fed him-”
“Jenny did nothing.”
“Everything was going so well, wasn’t it? Pat getting crazier every day, Jenny snuggling up closer to you. And then this happened.” I shoved the evidence bag at him, so close that I felt it brush his cheek. I just managed not to grind it into his face. “Turned out to be a big mistake, didn’t it? You thought it’d be a lovely romantic gesture, but all it did was send Jenny on a massive guilt trip. Like you said, she was happy, that summer. Happy with Pat. And you
