‘Here.’
I pass him the other sandwich. Steve takes it and holds it in his two hands, not opening it. ‘Did you get anything good?’
‘Tentative ID off the barman. No joy out of the uniform. Sophie’s guys got a male DNA profile off the mattress.’
He says, ‘What do we do?’
I say, ‘We need to talk to McCann.’
There isn’t a way around it any longer. In two hours, maybe three, Breslin will be back and suspicious and wanting to arrest Rory. Those couple of hours are all we’ve got.
Steve nods. He asks, ‘How?’
We have so many weapons. You pick them up from watching other Ds, you sift them out of squad-room stories, you come up with your own and pass them around; you stash them all away safe, for the days when you’ll need them. By the time you make Murder, you have an arsenal that could pulverise cities.
You come into an interview carrying a ten-pound stack of papers, so the suspect thinks you’ve got that much against him. You stick a videotape on top, so he’ll think you’ve got video evidence. You flip through the papers, put your finger down and start to say something, catch yourself – Nah, we’ll save that for later – and move on, leaving him to fret about what you’re saving. You pull out a voice recorder – My handwriting’s only terrible, mind if I use this instead? – so that later, when you turn it off and lean in confidentially, he’ll think you’re off the record; he’ll forget all about the interview-room recorders, whirring away. You read imaginary texts on your phone and swap cryptic comments (Happy days, the searchers got lucky) with your partner. You do the fake lie-detector test with an app these days: give the guy some bollix about electromagnetic fields and have him press his thumb on your phone screen after each question, and when you get to the one where he’s lying, you shift a finger and it flashes red graphs and LIE LIE LIE. You tell him the live victim is dead and can’t contradict him, or the dead one is alive and talking. You tell him you can’t let him leave till the two of you work this out, but if he’ll just tell you what happened, he can be home on his sofa with a nice cup of tea in time for Downton Abbey. You tell him it wasn’t his fault, you tell him the vic was asking for it, you tell him anyone would’ve done the same thing. You tell him witnesses heard him talk about how he loved kiddie porn, you tell him the pathologist says he rode the dead body till it started falling apart, you pummel him with the sickest shite you can come up with until he can’t stop himself from shouting at you that that’s all bollix, that wasn’t the way it went; and then you lift one eyebrow and say Yeah, right, then how did it go? and you listen while he tells you.
All our weapons are useless this time. McCann’s known the feel of them by heart, he’s had them shaped to his hands by wear, since long before we ever laid eyes on them. We’re going in bare.
I say, ‘We talk to him. That’s all we can do.’
‘He won’t talk back.’
‘He wants to tell us his story. They all do. Deep down, he wants us to know that him and Aislinn, that was true love, and whatever she was playing at with Rory was a load of shite that was begging for a punch. So let’s see how much of that we can get him to tell us.’
Steve says, ‘We focus on the relationship. Nothing else. We don’t go near Breslin being involved, or McCann’ll go loyal and shut his trap. Just talk about Aislinn.’
‘We’ve got one grenade,’ I say. ‘When Breslin found out that file box was full of the Desmond Murray case, he was relieved. Meaning he didn’t know McCann had worked that case. Meaning two days ago, at least, McCann hadn’t made the connection: he didn’t know Aislinn was Des Murray’s daughter. He didn’t know she was playing him all along.’
Steve says, ‘We save that.’
‘Yeah. That oughta go off with a bang.’
The birds have forgotten their fright and come back to peck about on the grass. Breslin is across the river by now, heading north.
Steve asks, ‘Where do we do it?’
This is what I was thinking about, all the way back here in the car, all the time I was waiting for Steve. ‘Interview room,’ I say.
His face turns towards me. ‘You think? We could clear out the incident room. Or come out here, even.’
‘No. We throw everyone out of the incident room, we might as well put up a sign saying there’s some big secret thing going down. Anyway, from now on we need to document everything, if we want a snowball’s chance in hell of making a case.’
‘He’ll know. The second we head for an interview room, he’ll know.’
‘He will anyway. No matter where we take him, there’s no way we can make this seem like a nice friendly chat, not past the first thirty seconds. The moment we bring up him having met Aislinn, he’s gonna know.’
The thought of that moment flicks across us like a small black splatter of sleet. It stops us talking.
We get the sandwiches down us, the Coke for caffeine. Then we go into the Murder building, in through the glossy black door with the combination my fingers could press in my sleep, nodding to Bernadette on our way past. We take off our coats and hang them neatly in our lockers, I take off my satchel and stash it away. Steve finds a copy of the family photo from the Desmond Murray case and tucks it in his suit pocket; I take photos of the arrays, on my phone, and then I shove them to the bottom of my locker and hope no one picks today to piss in it again. The twin metal slams of our locker doors echo, sharp and startled, against the tiles of the small dim room.
We go side by side up the wide marble staircase, our footsteps circling blurrily around the stairwell, to the squad room. We go in there with no stack of papers, no videocassettes, no voice recorders. We go in with our hands empty.
The squad room’s almost deserted, everyone out on cases or on lunch. For a second there, it reminds me of early Sunday morning, just before the gaffer came in to dump this case on me and Steve. The quiet, just touched at the edges by the far-off drone of traffic; the white light of the fluorescents sealing the room against the thick grey press of cloud at the windows, charging the scattered paperwork and forgotten coffee cups with latent meaning. Me thinking how I could love this room, if only.
McCann is hunched in his corner, peck-typing. He looks worse every time I see him. Me, bloody eejit, asking Fleas to look out for anyone who seems like he’s had a bad week. You could fit your case notes in those eyebags.
‘McCann,’ I say. ‘Got a few minutes? We could do with a hand.’
He looks up from his computer and he knows.