He’s breathing hard, the rush of disbelief hitting him all over again. ‘I couldn’t wrap my head . . . I asked her, I said, “What? What are you doing? What are you on about?” But she just kept pointing at the back door, telling me to go. I was begging her, don’t even know what I was saying. I said, “What’s happened? Just Wednesday night we were, three days ago, we— Have you had enough of me going home to my wife? Am I not spending enough time with you? I’ll end it with my wife tonight, I’ll move in, do anything— Was there something someone said about me, did your mate Lucy, I’ll explain, let me—”
‘But she was just shaking her head: no, not that, no, no, just go. She was trying to move me towards the kitchen, herding me, only I wouldn’t, or I couldn’t . . . I said – stupid, standing there, couldn’t keep up – I said, “Are we done? Does this mean we’re done?” And Aislinn, she stopped like she’d never thought of that. Startled. And then she said, “Well. Yes. I suppose it does.” ’
There’s no way I’d risk a glance at Steve now. Neither of us is breathing.
‘It felt like a joke,’ McCann says. ‘I was waiting for the punchline. But her face: she meant it. I said, all I could say, “Why?”
‘She said, “Go home.” I said, “Tell me why and I’ll go. Whatever it is, just tell me. I can’t live wondering.”
‘She looked at me and she laughed. Aislinn’s got a lovely laugh, sweet little giggle, but this wasn’t— This was something different. Great wild laugh, huge. She sounded . . .’
McCann’s throat moves as he hears that laugh again, growing and growing to fill his head, unstoppable. ‘She sounded happy. The happiest I’d ever heard her. And then she said, “You keep on wondering. Now fuck off.” ’
He stops talking.
O’Kelly says, ‘And.’
McCann says, ‘And I hit her.’
Me and Steve, we went at McCann by ripping away what he believed most about his life, blowing it up in front of his eyes, and hoping there’d be too little of him left to hold out against us. Just like Aislinn had been planning. But when we took as much of McCann as we could, shredded him into the last thing he ever wanted to be, we left him with No comment.
O’Kelly offered McCann a way back to who he was. McCann’s taken it.
He says, ‘It wasn’t murder, gaffer. It was manslaughter. I never meant her to die.’
The gaffer says, ‘I know.’
‘It never came to me that she might. Not till after.’
‘I know.’
I’m taking in a breath to say it. Cooper’s report. McCann is no bodybuilder. He landed that punch when Aislinn was down, head on the stone fireplace.
O’Kelly hears the breath. His eyes flick to me and he waits for what I’m going to say. His face still hasn’t changed. Only the eyes, moving in shadow, look alive.
I shut my mouth.
The gaffer’s eyes go back to McCann. He says, ‘We need this on record. You understand that?’
McCann nods. He keeps nodding for a long time.
O’Kelly leans his hands on the desk to stand up. ‘Time to go,’ he says.
McCann’s face turns up to him, quickly.
‘I’ll do it,’ the gaffer says. Steadying, like a surgeon promising to cut it out himself, not to let the med students touch the scalpel.
McCann says, ‘Maura.’
‘I’ll go see her. Soon as we’re done.’
McCann nods again. He stands up. Stays by the chair, arms hanging at his sides, waiting to be told where to go next.
The gaffer tugs down his jacket, carefully, like he’s got somewhere important to be. He switches off the desk lamp and looks around his office, absently, touching his pockets. His eyes fall on me and Steve like he forgot we were there.
‘Go home,’ he says.
We don’t talk. Down the long silent corridor, the padding of our feet on the carpet like muffled heartbeats. Down the stairs, through the cold draught that fidgets in the stairwell, to the locker room: coats on, satchels on shoulders, locker doors closing. Back upstairs, the smiles and the nods and the few words with Bernadette at reception stuffing tissue packets and throat lozenges into her bag, ready to go home. And outside, to the wide sharp blast of city-smell and cold.
The great courtyard, the floodlights, the civil servants scurrying home. It all looks strange: small stark paper things, far away. A big solve does that to you, leaves the world scoured dawn-white, sand-white, empty except for the solve smooth and heavy as a deep-dived rock in your hand.
Only it’s more than that, this time. The cobblestones feel wrong under my feet, thin skins of stone over bottomless fog. The squad I’ve spent the last two years hating, the mob of sniggering fucktards backstabbing the solo warrior while she gallantly fought her doomed battle: that’s gone, peeled away like a smeared film that was stuck down hard over the real thing. The squad I would’ve chopped off an arm to join, the shining line of ass-kicking superheroes, that went a long time ago. What’s left underneath is smaller than either of those, quieter and more complicated, done in finer detail. Roche, begging for a punch in the gob, which is high on my to-do list. The lads, each of them deep in his own mix of dodgy alibis and messy fibre evidence and the baby’s chickenpox, occasionally glancing up to roll their eyes at Roche’s bullshit or mine. The gaffer – it occurs to me that just maybe the gaffer throws the odd domestic our way, not because they piss me off, but because they have a good clearance rate and he wants our stats solid; or maybe, even simpler, because he knows we’ll work the hell out of them. All of them, and Steve. And me.
We stand in the courtyard, hands in our pockets, shoulders up against the cold. We’re not sure where to go from here; there’s no rule book, no ritual, to tell us what comes after a day like this one. Above us the Murder windows are lit and alert, ready for whatever tonight’s got in store. Somewhere up there O’Kelly and McCann are in an interview room, heads bent close, talking low and steady. Breslin is alone in the observation room, watching through the slow swell and ebb of his breath on the glass, not moving.
Steve says, ‘He was looking after us.’
He means the gaffer, sending us home. ‘I know,’ I say. It’ll be O’Kelly’s name on McCann’s statement sheet, O’Kelly’s name on the book of evidence that goes to the prosecutor. When we walk into the squad room tomorrow, we won’t be hissed out of it. Breslin will hate our guts, as long as he lives. The rest of them will watch O’Kelly, walking out of the building shoulder to shoulder with McCann to take him to booking, and understand.
Steve catches a sudden deep breath, blows it out again. ‘God,’ he says, and there’s a shake in his voice that he doesn’t bother trying to hide. ‘What a day.’
‘Look on the bright side. We’re never gonna have a worse week than this one.’
That pulls a helpless bark of laughter out of him. ‘You never know. We could get lucky: the Commissioner could get coked up and strangle a hooker.’
‘Fuck that. Someone else can work it. Just Quigley’s speed.’
Steve laughs again, but it’s gone fast. ‘The reason we didn’t see it from the start,’ he says, ‘is because we were thinking like cops. Both of us.’
He leaves it hanging there, like a question. He knows. Here I was so sure I was some secret-agent-level closed book, keeping my big plan all to myself. I watch our breath spread and fade on the air.