‘Ah, background checks,’ I say. ‘The foundation of every beautiful romance.’
‘Like I said: I know I’m nothing special. I had to check. But Aislinn came up clean as a whistle. She wasn’t even looking for me to square penalty points. She wanted nothing from me.’ McCann spreads his hands. ‘This is all I’ve got. If she wanted me, it was for this.’
Me and Steve let that lie just long enough, and come just close enough to looking at each other, that McCann gets edgy. ‘What?’ he demands.
‘The affair,’ I say. ‘That began in September?’
‘The beginning of September. Yeah.’
‘Date.’
‘I don’t remember.’
I’ve made him lie, rather than sound like the sap who’s clinging on to every tiny detail, and he knows we know. I let a flicker of a smile slip through, and see his jaw muscle roll.
‘We’ll leave it at the beginning of September,’ I say, being generous, which gets another twitch of his jaw. ‘And it kept going till last weekend. Any breakups along the way, anything like that?’
McCann has his arms folded again; his cop face is back, a flat slab. ‘No. No problems. No arguments. Everything was great.’
‘Autumn,’ Steve says thoughtfully, examining his Biro. ‘Winter. And not being crude, but you two weren’t just chatting any more. I’d say the picnics up the mountains weren’t doing the job for yous, were they? Where’d you meet?’
None of your business grits McCann’s teeth, but he says, ‘Her place.’
Steve frowns. ‘None of the neighbours ever saw you.’
‘Because I didn’t want them seeing me. I went down the laneway behind Aislinn’s house, over the wall, in by the back door. She gave me a key.’
And there’s the autumn intruder. ‘Fair play to you, climbing walls at your age,’ I say, almost holding back a grin – McCann doesn’t like that either. ‘Better than the gym any day. How often were you there?’
He’d love to lie about that, but he can’t risk it. ‘A couple of times a week. It depended. On work, my family, all that.’
‘How’d you make the appointments?’
‘Sometimes we’d make plans for next time before I headed off. Other times I’d leave her a note saying when I could call round. Or if I got a free hour or two I wasn’t expecting, I’d just go round to her.’
‘Where’d you leave the notes?’
‘Post-it in a 7-Up bottle, throw it over her back wall. She knew to check.’
‘We didn’t find any Post-its in the house.’
‘I’d take them back when I got there. Get rid of them.’
I do startled. ‘Why?’
‘Why do you think? Because I’ve been in this job too long to leave evidence floating around.’
The cold flat glance says And way too long to get tied in knots by the likes of you. ‘Jaysus,’ I say. ‘Lot of hassle for the odd shag.’
‘Depends how good of a shag.’ That nasty grin again, but I’ve seen McCann use it on suspects and it doesn’t work on me.
‘Why not ring Aislinn, or text her? Your number wasn’t even on her phone. Why not?’
‘Because I didn’t want it there.’
‘And why not go in her front door like a normal person?’
He eyes me with dislike. ‘Why the hell do you think?’
‘I’m asking you. Did she get off on the top-secret hush-hush vibe, yeah? Or did you get off on knowing she had to be ready for you to show up at any minute?’
‘She didn’t have to do anything. I wasn’t her boss.’
I say, picking my words carefully, ‘Would you not have been . . . angry, let’s say, if she hadn’t?’
McCann’s jaw clamps. ‘What d’you mean?’
‘What I said. You had Aislinn sitting at home, day in, day out, ready to jump whenever you decided to pull the strings. If you had pulled and she hadn’t jumped, what would have happened?’
‘Nothing. Most of the time I let her know I was coming; it was only now and then that I called round to her out of the blue. If I’d showed up and she hadn’t been there, or she’d been busy, I would’ve left and come back another time. End of story.’
I’m all sceptical. ‘You sure?’
‘Yes, I’m sure.’
‘You wouldn’t have given her the odd slap, no? Not to hurt her; just to teach her she couldn’t mess you about.’
McCann says, ‘I’ve never hit a woman in my life.’
‘Hmm,’ I say. ‘OK. You made Aislinn set her phone on swipe lock because you wanted to be able to read her texts. Right?’
His head flinches to the side, a fraction of an inch, before he catches it and faces us square again. He doesn’t like thinking about this. ‘I didn’t make her do anything.’
‘Asked her to. Let’s say that.’
‘I asked her, yeah. She could’ve told me to stick it. She didn’t.’
‘And did you read them?’ I’m hoping he didn’t, mainly out of professional pride. I like to hope that if a Murder D set up a plan to walk in on his bit on the side with her bit on the side, he would’ve made a better job of it than this mess.
McCann buries his face in his tea, but I catch the faint flush under the stubble. Out of all the options, this is what gets to him: the image of himself grubbing around in Aislinn’s text messages. He’s still holding on to how he loved her; in his mind, that snooping is the one thing he’s done to taint that. ‘A few times. Nothing worth seeing, and I felt like a twat. I stopped.’
I believe him. McCann knew nothing about Rory, not till Saturday night. Aislinn’s frantic plan to move things along did nothing at all. Lucy was right: she was miles out of her depth.
I ask, ‘Do you make your wife keep her phone on swipe lock?’
‘Don’t get smart with me. No, I fucking don’t.’ The shame puts a snap in his voice. ‘I wasn’t controlling Aislinn. I just didn’t want my wife finding out about us. That’s why I checked the texts: I needed to know Aislinn wasn’t telling her mates. That’s why I went in the back. That’s why I didn’t want her having my number. I liked her a lot, even trusted her more or less, but not enough to put my whole life in her hands. I wasn’t about to put myself in a position where, say she got too attached or had a bout of PMS or got ideas about blackmail, she could just take her phone down to my gaff and blow the whole thing wide open. Is that simple enough for you?’ Which is his biggest speech yet. Trying to shove that memory away made him talky.
‘So,’ Steve says dryly, ‘you’re saying you had no plans to leave your wife for Aislinn, no?’
McCann lets out a short harsh burst of laughter, just too loud. ‘Fuck that. Me and my wife, we have some hassles, but I love her. Love my kids even more. I wasn’t planning on going anywhere.’
‘So what were you going to do? Just keep on climbing Aislinn’s back wall’ – I snort; McCann gives me a filthy look – ‘for the rest of your lives?’
‘I didn’t have plans. I was having a laugh, seeing how things went.’
‘Even if he was planning on leaving his wife,’ I point out to Steve, ‘he would have wanted to keep Aislinn on the downlow. No point in giving the missus ammo for the divorce settlement.’
‘Did you not hear me? There wasn’t going to be a divorce settlement. Myself and Aislinn were grand exactly the way we were.’