The bookshop is two connecting rooms, not big ones. The front one is crammed with shelves – Rory’s not gonna be getting any fat customers. Hand-lettered signs say thriller and romance into the darkness; posters of old covers and illustrations hang from the ceiling, swaying restlessly in the sweep of cold air we’ve brought with us. The light is coming from the back room; through the doorway it looks jammed even tighter than the front, books piled on shelves instead of lined up, wavering stacks on the floor, covers curling.
‘That’s the second-hand section,’ Rory says, waving a hand towards the back. ‘I was organising it. I couldn’t sleep, and I couldn’t stand staring at my sitting room any longer, so I thought I might as well do something useful.’
‘Lovely shop,’ Steve says, looking around. ‘This is where you and Aislinn met, yeah?’
‘Yeah. Right over there, in the children’s section. She told me she loved bookshops. Magic, she said, specially small ones like this; you always felt like you might find the one book you’d been looking for all your life, at the back of some shelf . . .’ Rory rubs at the inside corners of his eyes. ‘If Saturday night had gone well, I was going to invite her here next time.’
And she could have helped him alphabetise the feng shui section. Jaysus, the romance. ‘I was going to do a picnic,’ Rory says. ‘On the floor – I was going to move shelves to make room. Explore the second-hand stuff, see if we could find that book she’d been looking for . . .’ Another rub at his eyes, harder. ‘Sorry. I’m babbling. I didn’t get any sleep.’
‘You’re grand,’ Steve says. I take out my notebook and fade back a few steps, between a shelf full of sepia guys running in helmets and a shelf full of laughing women with good hair giving babies adoring looks. The dimness makes them stir and twitch in the corners of my eyes. ‘Could we have the lights on in here?’
‘Oh. Yeah.’ Rory finds a switch by the door, and the lights flicker on. He looks even worse in the light, hunched and red-eyed, like he’s been barricaded in here for years hiding from the zombie apocalypse.
‘Thanks,’ Steve says. ‘Are you doing OK?’
Rory does some kind of movement that could mean anything.
‘We won’t take a lot of your time. I just wanted to ask you about your theory? The dumped guy watching Aislinn, getting upset when he found out she was preparing for dinner with you?’ Rory flinches, remembering the slagging that theory took off me and Breslin. ‘Yesterday, you started to say something about how you had a bit of evidence to back that up. Yeah?’
Rory glances over involuntarily to see if I’m gonna point and laugh again, but I’m all ears. ‘A guy, you said,’ Steve says, moving to catch his attention back. ‘A guy you saw in the street on Saturday night. Yeah?’
‘Yeah. There was a guy. I wasn’t making it up. I saw him.’
Steve nods, leaning against a bookshelf. ‘OK. When was this?’
‘When I was leaving Viking Gardens. When I’d given up on Aislinn. I turned down Astrid Road, towards the main road, and I passed the entrance to the laneway that runs behind Viking Gardens. The laneway where . . .’
That involuntary glance at me again. ‘Where you’d been hanging out to watch Aislinn,’ Steve says matter-of-factly. ‘And?’
‘And there was a man coming out of the laneway. We startled each other – both of us jumped.’
Steve nods. ‘What’d he look like?’
‘Middle-aged. A bit taller than me, but probably shorter than you? He had curly dark hair, going grey. Average build, I suppose.’
McCann, coming from Aislinn’s house.
He went out, and presumably in, the back way. The back door was locked when we got there; Breslin must have had a key to give him.
‘Do you remember what he was wearing?’ Steve asks. Easily, like this is no big deal, nothing at all.
Rory shakes his head. ‘Not really. A dark coat. A light-coloured scarf, I think. The main thing I noticed was that he seemed . . . I thought he was on something. Coke, maybe, or . . . I mean, I don’t know enough about drugs to know what does what, but he jumped a lot harder than I did, and his eyes were . . .’ He flares his eyes into a wild, unfocused stare. ‘If he wasn’t on something, I thought he had to be . . . unbalanced. Either way, he was the last thing I wanted to deal with, right at that moment. I sped up and got away from him as fast as I could.’
‘How close were you?’
‘About from here to that door.’ Rory points to the back-room door. Five feet, maybe six. Close enough for an ID; far enough, with no light but the streetlamp, for a defence barrister to hammer it down.
‘Did he say anything? Do anything?’
‘There wasn’t really time. I was only looking at him for a second or two, before I got out of there. When I got to the corner of Astrid Road I looked back, in case he was following me, but he was going in the opposite direction. He was walking fast, with his head down, but I’m almost positive it was the same guy.’
‘And all this would’ve been around half-eight?’ Steve asks.
‘Just after. I texted Aislinn one last time at half-eight, and then I gave her five minutes to answer. When she didn’t, I left. So when I saw the man, that would’ve been between twenty-five to nine and twenty to.’
That gave McCann anywhere from thirty-five to fifty-five minutes inside the house. Rory had left the laneway and headed for Tesco around 7.40. Maybe McCann had seen him having his moment, watched and waited for him to leave; maybe he hadn’t shown up till Rory was already gone. But by eight o’clock, when Rory knocked on the door and Aislinn didn’t answer, McCann was in there.
He wouldn’t have wasted time on losing the head when he realised what he’d done, not McCann. Ds are experts at slamming the emotions away for later, when we can afford them. As soon as he knew Aislinn was dead or on her way there, he would have taken off his shoes so as not to leave prints, grabbed a handful of kitchen roll and started wiping down every place where Breslin could have left a fingerprint. Turned the cooker off, because God forbid it should set off the smoke alarm before he was done and far away. Listened to the doorbell and the knocking, to Aislinn’s phone chirping and ringing as Rory tried to find her, and stayed out of eyeshot of the windows. When he was done, he would have scuffed out any shoeprints he’d left on the way in, stuffed the kitchen roll in his pocket to dump in a bin on the way home, and slipped out the back door. Thirty-five to fifty-five minutes: plenty of time.
‘How come you didn’t tell us about this on Sunday?’ Steve asks.