She shakes her head. ‘It should’ve. When I said Ash wouldn’t hurt anyone, I wasn’t just being sappy, trying to make her into a saint because she’s . . . dead. She genuinely was like that.’ She turns the smoke packet faster. This is jabbing at her. ‘I don’t know. Yeah, she was obsessed, but still, I couldn’t believe . . . But she just stared at me. Like I was talking gibberish. I still don’t get it.’
But I get it. Lucy’s right: Aislinn had got good at tangling people in her stories, building the relentless current that drew them in deeper and deeper, tugged them step by step towards the ending she could see waiting misty and beckoning on the far shore. She had got too good: in the end she tangled herself. By the time Lucy pointed out McCann’s wife and kids, it was too late for Aislinn to pull free. Her own current had grown too strong for her. It wound around her ankles, her knees, rising, and it dragged her downstream to a shore she never saw waiting.
Lucy says, ‘She’d wiped her face on her dress. This flowy pink dress that she’d bought specially for the big day, to make her look sexy and adorable and harmless and everything that would make Joe more likely to spill his guts – she’d spent two hundred quid on it – and she’d been smearing the skirt across her face like it was a tissue. It was covered in mascara and foundation and tears and snot. And all of a sudden Ash looked down like she was only noticing, and she went, “Jesus, what a mess! I’ll have to get this dry-cleaned. Joe likes it; I’ll need it again.” And she found a tissue and started dabbing at the worst bits. Like she’d spilled tea on it, or something. She wasn’t angry any more, or crying; it was like none of that had ever happened.’
‘What did you do?’
‘I begged her to please, please just give it a few days before she did anything. I thought once she got over the shock, she’d realise this was a terrible idea in like a hundred ways. I begged her.’ Lucy’s hand’s clamped around the cigarette packet, and her voice has started to rise. She drives it back down to normal. ‘But Ash – I swear she didn’t even hear me. She got the worst of the crap off her dress, and then she found her phone and Hailoed a taxi. Then she got up and gave me a hug – a long hug, tight – and she said, right in my ear, “When I dump him, I’m going to tell him it’s for his own good.” And then she left.’
I say, ‘And she didn’t give herself a few days to get over it.’
‘Inside a week,’ Lucy says, ‘she’d slept with him. I don’t know how she convinced him. She said it wasn’t hard; she made him think it was his idea, and she was the one who needed convincing. And afterwards she got upset – not too upset, just prettily tearful – because she was scared he’d hate her for getting carried away and doing such a terrible thing to his marriage, and she’d never see him again. So he got to reassure her that it wasn’t her fault and he’d never think less of her and never leave her and his marriage was a mess anyway and blah blah blah. It all went perfectly.’ There’s a savage twist on the last word.
‘And?’ I ask. ‘How’d the relationship go after that?’
Lucy flips open her smoke packet and pulls out another, glancing at me for permission; this is getting harder. I nod.
She says through the cigarette, tilting her head to the lighter, ‘Well. The first thing was they stopped going for drives up the mountains, which was kind of a relief, except that instead he’d call round to Ash’s house and they’d . . . stay there. Which wasn’t a relief.’ She tosses the lighter on the table and pulls hard on the smoke.
‘How often were they meeting?’
‘Same as before: maybe once a week, maybe two or three times. They didn’t have a routine. Joe said he had to play it by ear, to make sure his wife didn’t suspect anything.’
‘So he wasn’t planning on ending his marriage,’ I say.
‘Not yet, he wasn’t,’ Lucy says dryly. ‘But Aislinn was getting him there. The second thing was that he started buying her presents. Only tiny ones – a little china cat with a checked bow when he saw she had checked stuff in her kitchen, things like that – because his wife looked after the money and she noticed every euro, she’d have been on it like a bonnet if Joe had bought anything big. But he kept going on about how he’d love to buy her a diamond necklace, and take her to Paris because she’d said she wanted to travel . . . And Ash said it wasn’t just talk; he meant it. So she fed it. Told him how she’d always dreamed about having a diamond necklace, and printed off pictures of cheesy places they could visit in Paris.’
I think about the high frustrated yammer coming out of McCann’s phone, again and again and on and on, while the squad lads mime whipcracking and McCann tries to disappear into his chest. A girl who acted like every word out of his mouth was pure perfection would have made a nice change. I remember that fugly china cat, pride of place on Aislinn’s kitchen windowsill.
‘The third thing,’ Lucy says, ‘was that at the end of October – October; that’s three months after they met – Joe told Aislinn he loved her.’
The fucking idiot. ‘I’d say she was pleased with that,’ I say.
‘Over the moon. She brought me out for champagne to celebrate. I didn’t exactly feel like celebrating, but I went anyway, because . . .’ Lucy leans her head back on the sofa and watches the smoke trickle out of her cigarette. ‘I missed her,’ she says. ‘We were seeing a lot less of each other. Aislinn felt like she could never make plans, in case Joe wanted to call round. We weren’t even talking any more, not properly. I mean, we rang each other, we texted each other, but it was all stupid stuff: are you watching this on the telly, did you hear this song . . . Nothing that mattered.’
She’s still watching the curls of smoke ooze through the cold air, not looking at me. ‘We were losing hold of each other,’ she says. ‘Just little by little, but there was nothing I could do to stop it, and I knew if this didn’t end soon . . . All Ash could talk about was Joe, and I didn’t want to hear the gory details. What I did hear, I didn’t like.’
I say, ‘Like what?’
‘Like,’ Lucy says. Her head moves against the sofa. ‘She still didn’t have Joe’s phone number, you know that? He’s all in love with her, he wants to drink wine with her in a café in Montmartre, but give her his phone number: oh, Jesus, no. He’d only ever rung her once, the day after we met him, and that was from a blocked number. After that, when he wanted to see her, he’d leave a note at her house. And then – get this – when they met up, he’d make her hand the note back to him so he could destroy it.’
But once Aislinn got stuck into her brilliant new plan, she started taking photos of the notes for her secret stash, before she handed them over like a perfect obedient mistress. McCann thought he was on everything, the big bad Murder D running a watertight operation. He underestimated Aislinn by light-years.
‘Thorough,’ I say.
‘That’s not thorough. That’s fucked up. What kind of person even thinks of something like that?’
Ds are all about preserving evidence, not destroying it. McCann was already thinking like something else. I wonder if he noticed.