“We wouldn’t be doing our job if we didn’t. Nothing personal.”
“I know. I’m not— I’m just telling you.”
“Perfect. That’s all we want.”
Flashy Suit flipped a page. Martin arched his back—the crappy plastic chair creaked under his weight—and adjusted his waistband with his thumbs. “Jaysus,” he said. “I need to lay off the fry-ups; the missus is always telling me. Now, Toby: tell us about Friday night. Start when you left work, say.”
“It’s kind of patchy,” I said doubtfully. This was an understatement. What memories I’ve got came back in fits and starts, over months; at this stage, depending on where I was in the pain-meds cycle, I was sometimes convinced that I was back in college and I had got way too drunk at the Trinity Ball and whacked my head falling off the Edmund Burke statue outside Front Arch.
“You just give me as much as you can. The more the better. Even if it doesn’t seem relevant. Will I get you more water, before you start? Some of that juice?”
I told them what I remembered, which at that point was basically a few flashes of the pub and the walk home, that one image of the two guys staring at me across my living room, and then a couple of bad moments when I’d been on the floor. Martin listened with his hands folded over his belly, nodding and occasionally interrupting to ask a question—could I describe anyone who’d been in the pub? anyone I’d seen on the walk home? had I felt like anyone was following me? could I remember turning my key in the outer door of the building, had there been anyone nearby? Behind him, the TV sputtered with endless bright jerky images, cartoon children throwing their arms out in a dance routine, perky presenters with eyes and mouths stretched wide, little girls holding up dolls whose sparkling practiced smiles matched their own. Flashy Suit shook his pen, scribbled hard, then went back to writing.
Once we got to the central part of the night, the questions got more detailed and more insistent. Could I describe the guy reaching up to the telly? Height, build, coloring, clothing? Any tattoos or marks? What about the guy holding my laptop? Had they said anything? Any names? nicknames? What were their accents like? Anything unusual about their voices, a lisp, a stutter? High-pitched or low?
I told them what I could. The guy by the TV had been about the same height as me, so five eleven? skinny, white, acned; maybe around twenty, as near as I could guess; a dark tracksuit, a baseball cap; no tattoos or marks that I’d noticed. The one holding my laptop had been a few inches shorter, I thought, a bit stockier; white; something in the way he held himself had made me think he might be older, mid-twenties maybe; dark tracksuit and baseball cap; no tattoos or marks. No, I couldn’t see what color their hair was, the baseball caps had hidden it. No, I couldn’t see whether they had beards or mustaches, their tops had hidden the lower halves of their faces. No, I didn’t remember them saying any names. Both of them had had Dublin accents, nothing distinctive about their voices that I remembered. No, I wasn’t a hundred percent positive (Martin had gone back to each question two or three times, wording it a little differently every time; after a while I couldn’t tell, any more, what I actually remembered and what I was confabulating for the sake of an answer); more than fifty percent; eighty? seventy?
I was starting to lose my grip on the conversation. Talking about that night was doing things to me, more on a physical level than on an emotional one: a dark relentless fluttering in my stomach, a growing constriction in my throat, my hand or my knee leaping like a tic. And my pain meds were starting to wear off. The colors on the TV were harshening; the detectives’ voices and mine scraped at the inside of my skull. With a weak, sick urgency that was swelling with every second, I wanted this to be over.
Martin must have noticed. “Right,” he said, straightening up in his chair and throwing Flashy Suit a glance. “That’ll do us for today. Plenty there to keep us going. You did great, Toby.”
“Here you were worried you didn’t remember enough to be any use,” Flashy Suit said, flipping his notebook closed and sliding it into his jacket pocket. “We get plenty of people who weren’t hit in the head, still don’t manage to give us that much. Fair play to you.”
“Right,” I said. My head was shimmering; all I wanted to do was keep it together till they were out of the room. “That’s good.”
Martin stood up, arching his back with a hand to his spine. “My Jaysus, that chair. Any longer in that and I’d be in the bed next door. The doctor said you’ll be out of here sometime next week, yeah?” It was the first I’d heard of it. “You can have a look round your apartment then, let us know if there’s anything else missing, anything there that shouldn’t be. OK?”
“Yeah. No problem.”
“Great. If anything happens before then, we’ll make sure and update you.” He offered me his hand. “Thanks, Toby. We know this can’t have been easy for you.”
“It’s OK.” His hand was huge, enveloping, and even though his shake wasn’t crushing, it set off a fizzle of pain all the way up my arm. I was still smiling and nodding like an idiot, trying to calibrate the smile to polite friendliness and positive I was veering off into a grim rictus or a crazed leer, when I realized they were gone.
* * *
?Sean and Dec had both texted me a bunch of times to ask when they could come visit, but I hadn’t wanted to see them, or more accurately hadn’t wanted them to see me. After the cops’ visit, though, things seemed a little different; the car-thieves theory stripped away at least one layer of fear, the unreasoning terror that the men were still watching me from some nebulous darkness, unblinking and avid, biding their time till I got out of hospital and they could seize on their next chance. If Martin and Whatshisface were right—and they were detectives, experienced professionals, Martin looked like he had been doing this since before I was even born; they would know, wouldn’t they?—then all I had to do was buy a crappy Hyundai and keep my curtains closed, and I could handle that. The whole mess felt a small but solid notch clearer and more manageable; even the physical stuff seemed like it might, just possibly, be temporary. I texted Sean and Dec the next morning and told them to come in.
They came straight from work, in suits and ties, making me fiercely glad that I had got a nurse to unhook my IV so I could take off the terrible hospital gown and (locked in the bathroom, bubbling with impotent anger, biting my lip till I tasted blood when my left leg refused to obey me) battle my way into the tracksuit bottoms and T-shirt my mother had brought in. They knocked gently at the door and practically tiptoed into my room, all braced to stay steady and neutral in the face of almost anything—“Jesus Christ,” I said cheerfully and snarkily, “it’s not a bloody funeral. Come on in.”
Both of them relaxed. “Good to see you, man,” Dec said, breaking into a smile. He crossed fast to my bed and gave me a long, two-handed handshake. “Really good.”
“You too,” I said, matching the handshake and the grin. It really was good to see them, good but strange; it felt like it had been a long time, like I should be asking them what they were doing with themselves these days.
“Yeah, great to see you,” Sean said, shaking hands and giving me a very careful clap on the shoulder. “How’re you getting on?”