That cold touch on the back of my neck again. McCann – same as every Murder D; same as me – he’s the one who writes the scripts. He wouldn’t have liked opening his eyes one day and finding himself in the middle of someone else’s play.
‘And then,’ Lucy says. ‘The fourth time we went to Horgan’s. I was sitting there pretending to be depressed and wondering how soon we could leave, and all of a sudden I felt Aislinn freeze. The breath went out of her; her drink went down on the table, bang, like her muscles were gone. I turned around to see if she was OK, and she said – barely even a whisper, I almost didn’t hear her – “That’s him.”
‘He’d just come in the door. I recognised him too: his hair was a bit greyer, but it was the guy off the video, all right. He must have felt us looking, because he turned around. And Aislinn, straightaway, she did this’ – Lucy drops her eyelashes, glances up from under them with a tiny smile, ducks her head away to sip her coffee. ‘As quick as that. She was right on it.’
I say, ‘And it worked.’
That rough laugh again. ‘Jesus, yeah. It worked all right. Detective McCann did an actual double take, he was so stunned that this gorgeous woman was looking at him like that. And Ash giggled across at him, this idiotic giggle she’d been practising on all the other guys who tried it on. And when he went to the bar, she knocked back what was left of her drink and dashed up there, right beside him, to order another. And next thing you know, Detective McCann had paid for our drinks and he was bringing them over to our table.’
The fucking fool. ‘When was this?’
‘The end of July. We left after that drink – I didn’t have to fake wanting to get out of there; it was probably the weirdest conversation I’d ever had. Ash gazing up at this guy and laughing her head off at everything he said, and him swelling up, thinking he had her wrapped around his finger, and all the time . . . But before we left, Ash gave Detective McCann – Joe – her phone number. He rang her the next day.’
‘She was good, all right,’ I say.
‘Yeah,’ Lucy says. ‘She was. That was what really freaked me out. Watching her pull him in, so easily, like she’d been doing it all her life; and I realised that she had. Deep down, it was the same as when we were kids and she’d come up with stories to make things better. Just that this time, it was real. And I didn’t like it. It felt— This sounds melodramatic, I know that, but it felt dangerous.’
No shit. I ask, ‘Dangerous to her? To Joe? To you?’
Lucy says, ‘Aislinn wouldn’t hurt anyone. She— Ash was gentle.’
I’m not convinced. Gentle to start with, maybe, but someone who’s been as hard on herself as Aislinn had been for a solid year and a half, she’s not gonna go easy on anyone else. I let that go. ‘That doesn’t answer the question.’
‘Dangerous to her. Maybe to Detective McCann, too, but I wasn’t thinking about him; just about Ash. She didn’t realise this was real. She didn’t get the difference.’
That one is probably true. ‘So then Detective McCann contacted her,’ I say. ‘And they met up again?’
Lucy asks, ‘Is it OK if I smoke?’
‘Go for it.’
She doesn’t look at me while she disentangles her legs from the striped blankets, puts her coffee cup down, opens the smoke packet and finds a cigarette and shakes the lighter. She’s still got time to play it safe: I don’t know the rest of the story, Aislinn wouldn’t tell me, once she actually got her hands on Joe she got cagey . . .
There’s nothing I can say that I haven’t said already. I keep still and wait.
In the end Lucy blows a long stream of smoke away from me and says, ‘They met regularly. At least once a week, usually twice or three times.’
‘Were you ever there for the meetings?’
‘Not after that first time. I wanted to go, but Ash said I’d only cramp her style. Everything had to be about Joe.’
‘What’d they do?’
‘They weren’t sleeping together. Not then. Nothing like that. They just talked. He’d pick her up – never at her place, in case the neighbours saw him; always down on the quays – and they’d go for a drive, up the mountains or somewhere. I didn’t like that. I mean, you guys are always finding bodies up the mountains, right? He’s picked up this girl, he’s made sure no one saw him, he’s taking her to the middle of nowhere . . . How serial-killer can you get?’
I ask, ‘Did you have any reason to think he might be dangerous?’
Lucy shakes her head, reluctantly. ‘No. Ash said he was always nice to her – a total gentleman, was the way she put it. She didn’t exactly like him; she said he was way too intense about everything, even when he tried to make her laugh he was intense about it – but his stories were interesting, and he was an OK guy. He really cared about his work, and that reassured her: it meant he’d probably done a good job on her dad’s case, so there would be something to find out, right?’ A humourless little breath of smoke that could be a laugh. ‘Jesus. No shit.’
I say, ‘And he was OK with just talking? He wasn’t trying to move the relationship into something sexual?’
‘No. Ash was right about him not being the affair type: he never tried it on with her, not even a kiss. He was a romantic, she said; he liked being into her from afar. But he was into her, all right. Aislinn felt bad about it, what with him being married—’
‘On Sunday you told us she’d have no problem shagging a married man,’ I say. ‘Never mind going for drives with one.’
Lucy doesn’t bother with embarrassment. ‘Yeah, I lied. I needed you to know that she’d be on for going out with a married guy, and I couldn’t exactly explain why it was only this one particular married guy.’
Even when grief had just punched Lucy straight in the face, her mind was going ninety. She was well scared. ‘Fair enough,’ I say. ‘So Joe wasn’t coming on to Aislinn, but he was into her.’
‘Oh yeah. He kept telling her how great she was, how gorgeous, how intelligent – what he meant was she acted like everything that came out of his mouth was pure gold, which of course she did – and how he and his wife didn’t get on. He said the two of them had drifted into getting married when they were way too young, and they should never have done it, because his wife was too thick to understand his job and too selfish to get that he was doing something that mattered; all she cared about was that he wasn’t around to help with the kids’ homework or eat the dinner she’d cooked.’ A wry twist to Lucy’s mouth, around her cigarette. ‘Yeah. So Aislinn took her cue from that. She piled it on thick about what an amazing job Joe had, how amazing it was to know someone who was doing something so important, and please would he tell her another story about how he had been amazing and solved an amazing case? And of course he did.’