You don’t make the Murder squad without having a world-class gift for finding creative ways to get under someone’s skin and wriggle around in there till they’d rip themselves open to get rid of you; without being ready and happy to do it, even if the witness you’re working on is a devastated kid sobbing her heart out for her da. I’m not the exception – and neither is Steve, much as he’d love to think he is. It’s not like I was shocked, the first time I realised that not all the lads save that talent for interviews. It gets to feel right on you, like the gun at your hip that leaves you lopsided when it’s not there. Some of the lads can’t put it down. They use it to get anything they happen to want, or to get past anyone who happens to be in their way. Or to break anyone they want broken.
Steve is keeping his trap shut, which is a good call. Without noticing, I’ve got us deep into Phoenix Park, probably because it’s the only place around where I can drive without getting snarled up in traffic and idiots. The roads are straight, between wide gentle meadows and rows of huge old trees, and I’m going like the clappers. The Kadett is about ready to have a fit of the vapours.
I slow down. Pull over, nice and neat, signalling well in advance and keeping one eye on my rear-view mirror.
‘We need Lucy Riordan’s address,’ I say. ‘I’ve got her mobile number.’
We pull out our phones. Steve dials his contact at one of the mobile networks and hits speaker; we listen to the even buzz of the ring. Deer watch us from under bare spreading branches. I realise I’m still wearing my shoe covers – I’m lucky they didn’t slide on the pedals and crash the car. I take them off and toss them in the back seat. The sunlight is still thin and warmthless; it still feels like dawn.
Chapter 2
Steve’s contact gives us a home address for Lucy Riordan in Rathmines, a work address at the Torch Theatre in town, and a birth date that makes her twenty-six. ‘Just gone half-nine,’ Steve says, checking his watch. ‘She should be home.’
I’m dialling my voicemail; I’ve got a new message, and I just can’t wait to hear it. ‘She’ll be sleeping off last night. Like anyone with sense, this time on a Sunday morning.’ The park is making me edgy. Outside the car windows the sky is dead, not one bird, and the massive trees feel like they’re slowly tilting inwards over us. ‘You head up the interview.’ Seeing as I don’t have a legit reason to arrest Crowley or punch him in the mouth, or to tell the gaffer where to shove his domestics, I’m gonna take the head off the first person who gives me half an excuse, and I don’t want it to be our key witness.
I didn’t use to be like this. I’ve always had a temper on me, but I’ve always kept it under control, no matter how hard I had to bite down. Even when I was a kid, I knew how to hold it loaded and cocked while I got my target in range, lined up my sights and picked my moment to blow the bastard away. Since I made Murder, that’s been changing – slowly, I never lose a lot of ground at once, but I never gain any back, and it’s starting to show. The last few months, I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve caught myself in the half-second before I splattered temper everywhere and stuck myself cleaning up the mess for the rest of my life. I wasn’t kidding about telling that witness he was too stupid to live: my mouth was opening to do it, when Steve came in with some soothing question. I know, dead certain, that someday soon neither of us is gonna catch me in time.
And I know, dead certain, that the rest of the squad is gonna be on that moment like sharks on chum. It’ll be blown up to ten times life-size and spread all round the force like it’s a full-frontal shot of me naked, and every day for the rest of my career someone will slap me in the face with it.
Murder isn’t like other squads. When it’s working right, it would take your breath away: it’s precision-cut and savage, lithe and momentous, it’s a big cat leaping full-stretch or a beauty of a rifle so smooth it practically fires itself. When I was a floater in the General Unit, fresh out of uniform, a bunch of us got brought in to do the scut work on a murder case, typing and door-to-door. I took one look at the squad in action and I couldn’t stop looking. That’s the nearest I’ve ever been to falling in love.
By the time I made it onto the squad, something had changed. The pressure level means Murder is balanced so finely that it only takes a few new heads to shift the whole feel of the squad: turn that big cat rogue and edgy, set that rifle warping towards its moment to blow up in your face. I came in at the wrong time, and I got off on the wrong foot.
Part of it was not having a dick, which apparently is the main thing you need to investigate murders. There’s been women on the squad before, maybe half a dozen of them over the years; whether they jumped or got pushed, I don’t know, but by the time I got there none of them were still around. Some of the guys figure that’s the natural order; they thought I had some cheek, swanning in like I had a right to be there, and I needed to be taught a lesson. Not all of them – most were fine, at least to start with – but enough.
They tested me, my first weeks on the squad, the same way a predator tests a potential victim in a bar: tossing out small stuff – worn-out jokes starting Why is a woman like a, comments about me being on the rag, hints about how I had to be pretty good at whatever I’d done to get this gig – to see if I’d force myself to laugh along. Checking, just like the predator checks, for the well-behaved one who’ll take the putdowns and the humiliation sooner than God forbid make a fuss; who can be forced, shove by shove, into doing whatever he wants.
Deep down, though, it wasn’t about me being a woman. That was just their in; that was just the thing that they thought would, or should, make it easy for them to push me around. Deep down, this was simpler. This was about the exact same thing as primary school, when Ireland was still lily-white and I was the only brownish kid around, and my first ever nickname was Shiteface. It was about the same thing as everything else humans have done to each other since before history began: power. It was about deciding who would be the alpha dogs and who would be at the bottom of the pile.
I went in expecting that. Every squad hazes the newbie – my first day on Missing Persons, they tried to send me door-to-door asking if anyone had seen Mike Hunt – and Murder was already growing a rep for doing it that bit harder, fewer laughs, more edge. But just because I expected it, that didn’t mean I was gonna take it. If I learned one thing in school, it’s this: you never let them get you on the bottom of the pile. If you do, you might never get up again.