“Have a look through it anyway,” Martin suggested, only it wasn’t really a suggestion. “Maybe something’ll ring a bell.”
Nothing did. Fish food from when I’d had a tank years back, a T-shirt I’d meant to return to the shop but had forgotten about, why would I have a Radiohead CD, had someone lent it to me, was someone out there bitching about how I had never given it back? I kind of thought there had been an ancient digital camera in there, but I couldn’t be sure and certainly couldn’t remember, when Martin asked, what photos had been on it—pre-college holiday in Mykonos with the guys maybe, long-ago parties, family Christmases? The sun was turning the room into a terrarium and the chemical smell was giving me a headache, but I didn’t want to suggest opening the patio door when the detectives weren’t complaining and anyway there was a new lock on it, shiny and not quite covering the pale splintered wood where the old one had been broken out, and I didn’t have the key. I had changed my mind about these guys being better company than my mother. At least I could have told her to leave.
They took me through the apartment methodically, ruthlessly, room by room, drawer by drawer. My clothes were put away wrong, too. My grandfather’s watch was in fact gone: I gave the detectives a description, they promised to check the pawnbrokers and the antique shops and the cash-for-gold places. My condoms were gone too, but we all felt there was less chance of tracking those down, not that I wanted them back, if it would prevent those guys from reproducing I was happy to donate to the cause, we all had a good laugh about that. My head was killing me.
“Right,” Martin said, at long last, giving Flashy Suit a glance that made him flip his notebook shut. “We’ll leave you to settle back in. Thanks for doing this, Toby. We appreciate it.”
“Have you,” I said. We were in the bathroom: sparkly clean, bottles perfectly lined up, too small for the three of us. “Have you got any ideas? About who they were?”
Martin scratched at his ear and grimaced. “Not really. I’m feeling a bit guilty about that, to be honest with you. Normally, by this time? we’d have a fair idea who we’re after: this fella always gets in using the same method, that fella empties the fridge onto the floor and has a shite in the bed, the other fella has a tattoo that matches a witness description . . . Not saying we’d always be able to put them away for it, but mostly we’d be pretty sure who they were. This time . . .” He shrugged. “Nothing’s ringing any bells.”
“They might’ve been new on the job,” Flashy Suit said, a bit apologetically, tucking his pen away. “That’d explain why they lost the head so easily, too. Rookies.”
“Could be,” Martin said. “How about you, Toby? Anything come to mind since we last talked?”
By this time my head had cleared enough that I no longer suspected Gouger of being behind the breakin, but I did wonder about Tiernan. I’d heard enough of his rants (sheeple gallery owners without the guts to take on an artist till someone else had given him the stamp of approval, conniving female artists using their wiles and their tits to get gallery and media space over far more talented men, mindless trend-follower critics who wouldn’t recognize groundbreaking art if it introduced itself) to know that he was the type to find someone else to blame for his problems and then get pouty and obsessed about it, and he had presumably met plenty of dodgy guys with burglarizing experience during his travels for the exhibition. I still wasn’t about to tell the cops the whole saga, specially when I had nothing more than a vague suspicion, but I did wish I’d paid more attention to Tiernan’s youths when he brought them into the gallery. “No,” I said, easily enough. “I’ve gone back over everything, I don’t know how many times, but I’m not coming up with anything new.”
Martin stayed put, watching me amiably, swinging the hand-towel ring back and forth with one finger. “No?”
I couldn’t tell what that meant, whether he was just hoping to jog my memory or whether he was telling me he knew I was hiding something. Both of them felt enormous suddenly, in the small cramped space, I was backed up against the bath with no way out— “No,” I said. “Nothing.”
After a moment Martin nodded. “Right, so,” he said cheerfully. “You’ve got our cards. Yeah?”
“I guess—” I had some vague memory of them leaving me little cards, that first time in the hospital. I looked around the bathroom like they might have teleported into my sink.
“Here you go,” Martin said, fishing in his pocket and handing me a white card, big clear type, fancy Garda seal. “You be sure and let us know if anything comes to you. Yeah?”
“Yeah. I will.”
“Great. We’ll be in touch. You relax, now; get some decent grub into you, have a couple of cans, leave the unpacking till later.” To Flashy Suit: “Will we head?”
* * *
?My mother arrived practically as soon as the detectives left, of course, with bags of inexplicable shopping (the basics, bread and milk and whatever, mixed in with stuff like a knobbly beige object that she informed me was ginger, “just in case”). She didn’t stay long, and she didn’t make any helpful offers to find a carpenter to fix the sideboard drawers or anything. She was adapting, gradually and carefully, to this new landmined world where I was trapped, and I didn’t know whether to be grateful or to hate her for the implication that she thought it was permanent. She managed not to ask whether I would be all right on my own; when she hugged me at the door, I managed not to flinch.