‘Did it bother Aislinn?’ I ask.
‘Not really. I told her I didn’t like it, but she brushed it off. She thought Joe was just paranoid that she might go to his wife – which she figured was fair enough, specially considering he was right. But I thought it was more than that. Joe wanted to be the one calling the shots. His way meant Ash had no say in anything: if he dropped her a note saying “Seven on Wednesday”, she couldn’t text him going, “Hey, I’m busy Wednesday, how about Friday?” All she could do was ditch whatever she’d meant to do on Wednesday evening, put on a pretty frock and wait at home. And sometimes, right?’ Lucy’s head comes up so she can watch me. ‘Sometimes he didn’t even give her that much notice. He just showed up at her door and expected her to drop everything and spend the evening with him. Ash thought it was just because his schedule was unpredictable, but to me it sounded like he was checking up on her. He wanted to see what she was doing when he wasn’t looking.’
Her eyes are dark and speeding across my face, trying to catch hold of what I’m thinking. We both know what she’s saying. If McCann decided to check up on his girl, Saturday night, he would have found candlelight and wineglasses and her polished to a glow, and all for someone else.
I keep my face blank. ‘What happened if she wasn’t there when he told her to be?’
‘She always was. Like I told you before, she was ditching me all the time, the last few months. That was why.’
She ditched Rory, too, the first day they were supposed to have dinner at Pestle. Really sorry, something’s come up tonight! Rory thought she was looking after her sick ma; we thought she was playing hard to get. I say, ‘Did she ever do anything he didn’t want her to?’
Lucy makes a face. ‘Not really. I mean, her whole plan was based on being his dream woman.’
‘No arguments? No disagreements?’
‘I told you, he worshipped Ash. Going by what she said, they would’ve sounded like the perfect couple, if you didn’t know better. The only time they had any kind of disagreement was once, maybe at the end of September? Joe picked up Aislinn’s phone and started messing with it, and it was locked, like with a code. He wasn’t happy about that, at all. He wanted to know if she was texting people about him.’
‘What kind of not-happy are we talking about?’
One corner of Lucy’s mouth twists, around her cigarette. ‘Do you mean did he hit her?’
‘Did he?’
She thinks about lying, but after a second she shakes her head. ‘No. From what Aislinn told me, he never touched her, not like that. She never sounded like she was even worried that he might. And she would’ve told me – what was I going to do about it, call the cops?’ She leans forward to tap ash. ‘From what she said, Joe wasn’t even angry about the phone; more freaked out. He said it was because of his wife: it’s a small city, people gossip, you never know who might say something to the wrong person . . . But Aislinn said he acted more like he was terrified the phone was full of texts to her mates about how she’d pulled this middle-aged fool who was going to erase her penalty points. Aislinn thought he wasn’t totally convinced, at least not yet, that this was real.’
‘McCann’s a detective,’ I say. ‘Like you said. His instincts must’ve been telling him something was up. He just didn’t want to hear it.’
A small, humourless laugh out of Lucy. ‘No kidding. If only he’d had the sense to listen.’
‘What did Aislinn do?’
‘She begged for forgiveness like she’d run over Joe’s dog – obviously she didn’t put it that way, but I’m translating. She let him look through every text on her phone – which, yeah, I was delighted about: there was stuff in there that . . . I mean, nothing major, but just texts about nights out that I didn’t necessarily want a Guard to see.’ A quick glance at me. Seeing as I don’t care, I stay blank. ‘That didn’t even occur to Ash; all she cared about was getting Joe in deeper. And of course she started keeping her phone on swipe-lock. So he could see everything on there, any time he wanted.’
He had some willpower, not touching that phone on Saturday night. It hits me all over again how much of a fight me and Steve are in for. ‘She was OK with that?’ I ask.
Lucy lifts a shoulder. ‘She didn’t care. It was only for a few months, right? And Joe being obsessed was what she wanted; she wasn’t complaining. But I didn’t like it. A control freak like that . . .’
She lets it fall. I don’t pick it up. She’s right, obviously: this should have been yet another alarm bell waking Aislinn the hell up. This guy who couldn’t let a text or a Post-it go out of his control, how did she think he was gonna take it when she kicked him to the kerb? Her own floodwaters had risen so deep around her, they drowned it out. She underestimated herself too.
‘By the beginning of December,’ Lucy says, ‘Aislinn said she was nearly there with Joe. He told her he loved her all the time, he was constantly going on about the great stuff he’d do for her when they could be together; he was this close to offering to leave his wife. And Ash – Jesus. She was on a total high, all the time: talking a mile a minute and screaming laughing at nothing and never able to sit still, she was like someone on speed. Not from having a guy wrapped round her finger – Ash wasn’t like that; because her plan was working. She could hardly believe it. To her, it was like finding out that magic was real and she had it, she could turn pumpkins into carriages, she could turn princes into frogs and back again. Do you . . . Does that make any sense? Do you get it?’
‘Yeah,’ I say. ‘I totally get it.’ Out of nowhere I think of my first morning on Murder. Me in my new suit cut for victory, satchel swinging and shining, my heels on the footpath laying down a fast rhythm on the city swirl of buses and voices as I sliced straight through them heading for the Murder squad room waiting for me, finally, finally all my own. I could have done the walk to the door in ten-foot leaps. That morning I could have pointed at the Castle and made its roofs unfurl in great gold petals and trumpet blasts.
Lucy says, jamming out her cigarette, ‘And then Rory came along.’
I say, ‘Rory wasn’t in the plan, no?’
‘The Plan . . .’ She spreads her hands with a flourish. ‘I’d started thinking of it like that, in capital letters: THE PLAN, da-da-da-dum. No: Rory definitely wasn’t in the plan. Rory was my fault. I dragged Aislinn out to that book launch – and it took some dragging – because I was hoping if she had a night off from sitting at home obsessing over whether Joe would call round, if she went out and had a laugh and a chat about normal stuff with people our age, then she might get some perspective. Realise how mental this whole thing was.’