After a moment Lucy lets out her breath and pulls her fingers free of the throw fringe. ‘I guess it’ll have to be,’ she says.
‘You’ve got my card,’ I say. ‘I seriously doubt McCann’s gonna come after you; it’d be too risky and it wouldn’t do him a lot of good, now that you’ve talked to me, plus he’s gonna have other stuff on his mind. But if anything happens that worries you, if anyone gives you hassle or even if something just strikes you as weird, you ring me. Yeah?’
She nods, flexing her fingers to get the blood back into them, but I’m not sure she’s really heard me. ‘I wanted Ash to have that happy-ever-after ending,’ she says. ‘I really did. Even if it was a million miles away, with that backpacker in Machu Picchu. She deserved it. But it’s like she wasn’t able to want that for herself, not till she got Joe out of her way. She could barely even see the happy ending. That’s how huge he was in her head.’
‘Or else she saw it just fine,’ I say, ‘and she wanted it, but she wanted to get Joe even more.’ This shrink-style crap is making me antsy, or maybe that’s just from sitting still hearing about people’s stupid sides when there’s shit I need to be doing. I get up. ‘I’ll be in touch when I need you to come in and give your statement. Till then: thanks. I mean it.’
Lucy makes a small worn noise that could be a laugh. ‘Look at that,’ she says. ‘Here we are, you and me, getting Ash what she wanted all along. I guess this was one way to get it.’
She walks me to the door of the flat, but she shuts it behind me fast, without coming downstairs. Lucy’s got some crying to do. Me, I’ve got nothing to do except head down the lopsided stairs that smell of soup and dead flowers, with Lucy’s story hammering inside my head while I try to work out what the hell I’m gonna do with it.
Chapter 16
I get in my car and check my messages – phones go on mute during interviews, or Sod’s Law says your ma will ring. Text from Sophie: Got DNA profile from fluids on mattress. Male, not in system. Get me sample from your suspect we’ll run comparison. Steve’s sent me an audio file of Breslin explaining to him how much potential he has and how he should be sure not to throw it away. Random Google Blonde has another four million depressing messages from the various dating sites. I delete her accounts.
I text Steve: Ring me. Then I sit there, running the heat to try and thaw my feet after Lucy’s flat, and watch the people going past. They make me edgy. Dozens and dozens of people, they just keep coming, and every single one of their heads is crammed with stories they believe and stories they want to believe and stories someone else has made them believe, and every story is battering against the thin walls of the person’s skull, drilling and gnawing for its chance to escape and attack someone else, bore its way in and feed off that mind too. Even the cute little student mincing along in her flowery dress, the shuffling old fella with his shuffling spaniel, they look Ebola-lethal. I don’t know what the fuck is wrong with me. Maybe I’m getting the flu.
It’s eleven minutes of this before my phone lights up with Steve’s name. ‘Hey,’ I say. ‘Can you talk?’
‘Yeah. Not for long; I’m supposed to be talking to the staff in the newsagent. Breslin’s only across the road, in the bakery. You get the file?’
‘Yeah,’ I say. ‘Listen. Once I showed Lucy that note from Aislinn, it took her about a quarter of a second to ID the mystery boyfriend. Only it wasn’t Breslin.’
Before Steve can ask what the hell, it hits him. ‘Jesus. McCann?’
‘Bingo.’
‘What the . . . ? Why?’
I give him the fast version. At the end he says, after a moment of silence, ‘Oh Jesus.’ His voice sounds raw.
‘Yeah, we can do that part later. You got anything I should know?’
Steve says, ‘My guy at the mobile company emailed me. Full records on the phone that called it in.’
‘Anything to prove it’s Breslin’s?’
‘No. All the other numbers trace back to journalists. Including—’ I know what’s coming. I say it with him: ‘Crowley.’
Breslin, the little shit. He’s been top of the rat list from the get-go, but it still gives me a quick hit of anger. ‘Let me guess,’ I say. ‘Early Sunday morning.’
‘Quarter to seven.’
That pulls a hard crack of laughter out of me. ‘And then he came in and gave us a lecture about squad loyalty. What a load of bollix. Breslin figured if the pressure around this case got turned up high enough, I’d sign off on Rory Fallon just to get it off my desk. He knew that little cocksucker Crowley would jump on the chance to give me shite, and he shoved me straight under Crowley’s wheels. Gave Crowley the scoop, told him to go all out: hints that I wasn’t up to the job, photos that made me look like a raving lunatic. The bleeding shitehawk.’
‘Sounds about right,’ Steve says. The tight-wound note to his voice means something’s at him, but my mind’s not on that. My Crowley problem didn’t begin on Sunday morning.
‘When were the other calls from that phone to Crowley?’ I ask.
‘There’s just the one call. Eight to other journos, over the last year or so, but just the Sunday-morning one to Crowley.’
Crowley’s magic appearances started last summer, and there’ve been four or five of them since. If Breslin’s been using that phone to run his journos, he’s not the one who’s been running Crowley into my scenes; not until this one. Me sulking at my desk, convinced everything about this case was part of a big dark conspiracy against me. I feel like a gobshite all over again.
‘Here’s the thing,’ Steve says. His voice has tightened another notch. ‘How’d Breslin know we had the case?’
‘Because he’d called it in to Stoneybatter almost two hours earlier. Even allowing for delays, paramedics, uniforms, whatever, it had to be hitting the squad by then.’
‘No. How’d he know it was you and me? Crowley’s a cute hoor; he knows the score. He wouldn’t give serious trouble to O’Neill, say, or Winters, if one of them had pulled the case; he wouldn’t want to burn his bridges with them and all their mates. You and I are the only ones he’d be willing to hassle. Ringing Crowley wouldn’t have done Breslin any good, unless he already knew the case was going to us. And the gaffer only gave it to us just before seven.’
The silence lands hard. Down the line between me and Steve I hear wind, and a faraway kid screaming, and the hiss of emptiness.
‘Maybe Breslin knew we were on night shift,’ I say. ‘He knows the gaffer always throws us the domestics . . .’
I can hear in my own voice how weak it is. Steve says, ‘How’d he know the case wouldn’t come in ten minutes later and go to one of the day shift?’
The squad room, waiting in cold early light for the day to begin. O’Kelly tossing the call sheet on my desk: I picked it up on my way in, said I’d bring it upstairs to save Bernadette the hassle . . . I say, and my voice sounds calm and clean and very strange, ‘Breslin had talked to the gaffer.’
Steve says, ‘Can you think of any other way he could have known?’