‘Even then . . .’ Steve shakes his head. ‘A handwriting expert’s not going to give us a match on this much.’
‘No way,’ I say. I go back to swiping: 9F, 630W, 7. ‘And Breslin would know that. Again: not taking any chances.’
‘No way he was planning on killing Aislinn from the start.’
‘No, but he wasn’t planning on leaving his wife for her, either. Breslin likes his life. He likes his kids. He likes his house, and his car, and his fancy sun holidays. Probably he even likes his wife, more or less. He liked Aislinn, too, but not enough to risk losing all the rest of it. If she went bunny-boiler on him, he didn’t want her having any evidence she could show his wife.’
‘He did a good job.’ Steve doesn’t look happy about it.
7, 745Th, 8, and then: a plain sheet of white paper. Careful, even handwriting – not Breslin’s; this looks like a match to the signatures and scribbles on Aislinn’s paperwork. Every loop neatly rounded, every line so straight that she must have put a lined sheet underneath to guide her, keep it perfect. I screen-pinch it bigger and we read, me glancing at Steve for a nod when I’m ready to scroll down.
Once upon a time two girls lived in a cottage in the deep dark forest. Their names were Carabossa and Meladina.
Carabossa ran barefoot in the forest all day and all night. She climbed the tallest trees. She swam in the streams. She trained wolf cubs to eat from her hand. She shot bears with her bow and arrow.
Meladina never left the cottage, because a wizard had put a spell on her. Carabossa couldn’t break the spell. No prince could break it. No good witch or wizard could break it. Meladina thought she would be trapped there forever. She looked out the cottage window and cried.
Then one day Meladina found a spell book buried under the floor of the cottage. She started to teach herself magic. Carabossa warned her that the wizard was dangerous, and she should have nothing to do with him, but Meladina had no choice. It was that or die in the cottage.
When she had learned enough, Meladina worked her magic and moved the spell from herself onto the wizard. He was trapped in the cottage forever, and Meladina ran out to climb trees and swim in streams with Carabossa. And they lived happily ever after.
If I got the ending wrong, I need you to tell them. Love and more love.
‘What the hell?’ Steve says.
I say, ‘That’s meant for Lucy.’
‘Yeah, I get that part. But what’s it mean? Like, Aislinn fell in love with Breslin – OK, that’s the spell – and it kept her trapped. And then what? She got him to fall in love with her too? Or what?’
‘I don’t care. Lucy can explain all the cutesy fairy tale crap. Because that’s what this end part means: if shit goes wrong, Lucy needs to tell us – or whoever – the whole story. And it means Aislinn was scared. As far back as’ – I tap at the phone, going back to Sophie’s e-mail – ‘as far back as the twelfth of November, Aislinn was scared things could end exactly like this. She made her will right around then, remember?’
‘Too scared to leave him,’ Steve says, trying it out. ‘And that’s the spell?’
‘Scared he was going through her laptop, too, or she wouldn’t have bothered with the password – not on something she wanted found. Sounds like a lovely romance all round.’ I’m checking the dates on the note pics, too, while I’m at it. Ninth of September, 5.51pm. Fifteenth of September, 6.08pm. Eighteenth of September, 6.14pm. Aislinn getting home from work, finding a note, taking a photo, uploading it onto her computer and deleting it off her phone. Planning something.
‘And her reversing the spell on him is her trapping him, somehow. Getting him locked up, maybe?’ Steve has his eyebrows pulled together and his hands clasped on top of his head, thinking it through. ‘The whole Rory thing was Aislinn trying to provoke Breslin into beating the shite out of her, so he’d go to prison, because that was the only way she could think of to get rid of him? Except she didn’t think things would go this far?’
I consider that. It fits with what we know about Aislinn: na?ve enough to think an idiot plan like that could actually work, just because it played so nicely in her head; spent such a big chunk of her life trapped by someone else’s demands, she could have panicked when it happened again. ‘It’d explain why Aislinn kept pics of the notes. Evidence of the affair, in case Breslin tried to claim he’d never seen her in his life.’
‘Except why just the notes? Why not, I don’t know, set her phone to voice-record a conversation? Or take photos of him naked in her bed when he crashed out?’
I could’ve gone my whole life without that mental image. The things this job puts you through. ‘Scared he’d catch her at it,’ I say. ‘Or go through her phone before she could upload the file and delete it.’
‘Dammit,’ Steve says. ‘Even one nude pic would’ve been hard evidence. This stuff . . .’ He blows out a breath. ‘Unless Lucy’s got something amazing up her sleeve, we’ll be lucky if we ever have enough for a charge. Never mind a conviction.’
He’s watching the kids put dirt in their hair, with his hands clasped between his knees. The tense hunch of his spine says he’s not happy.
I say, ‘You don’t need to do this.’
It needs saying. Last night, with me and Steve caught up in our adrenaline hurricane from the hunt and the realisation, I took it for granted we were in this together, all the way to the finish line. I think he did too. Today, with Steve dumping doom and gloom into this morning made of flat chilly sky and Deasy’s watchful eyes and leftover rain dripping inside the park hedges, it feels like he should have a chance to change his mind.
His face turns towards me. Not blank; he’s not trying to pretend the thought’s never crossed his mind. Complicated.
He says, ‘Neither do you.’
‘I don’t have a lot to lose here. You do. And it’s my case.’ It gives me a quick flash of something like pain, the fact that part of me can’t stop thinking like a detective: my case, my responsibility. It’ll wear off, somewhere down the line. ‘You can throw a sickie. Get food poisoning. Go home, come back in a couple of days when the dust’s settled.’
‘We could both still get out of it. Tell Breslin that Rory’s ID’d McCann as being on the scene, and we know McCann’s not involved but we don’t want to fuck him up by letting him get dragged into court as an alternative theory of the crime, so we’re going to back off Rory and mark this one unsolved. Then tell Rory the ID didn’t go anywhere. The gaffer’ll give us a bit of shite for not getting the solve, but Breslin’ll put in a good word for us. Bang: we’re done. Like the whole thing never happened.’