This time I remember to answer. ‘Yeah? What?’
‘I figured we should find out if Aislinn’s shown up on Organised Crime’s radar, right? So I checked if anyone else has run her through the system.’ I start to stand up, heading over to have a look at Steve’s monitor, but he shoots me a fast head-shake and a warning stare. ‘Stay put. And yeah, sure enough: seventeenth of September last year, someone ran a check on her.’
We look at each other.
I say, ‘There’s got to be a couple of dozen Aislinn Murrays out there. Minimum.’
‘Aislinn Gwendolyn Murrays? Born the sixth of March ’88?’
My mind is speeding. ‘I don’t want to bring Organised Crime in on this. Not yet. I’ve got a pal—’
Steve says, so quietly that even I barely hear it, ‘The login was “Murder”.’
We look at each other some more. I can feel the same expression on my face that’s on Steve’s: wary; trying to work out just how wary to be.
‘If it was Murder business,’ I say, ‘then whoever it was shouldn’t have a problem sharing.’
Steve’s face shuts down into a warning. He’s opening his mouth to tell me why this is a bad idea, and he’s right – the smart thing is to keep this to ourselves, go at it through back channels – but that missing statement page is still digging at me, and I’ve had it up to here with keeping my mouth shut and tiptoeing around my own squad. I swivel my chair around to face the room and snap my fingers over my head. ‘Hey! Over here.’ I make it good and loud: faces turn, conversations fall away. ‘Aislinn Gwendolyn Murray, DOB sixth of March ’88. Anyone remember running her through the computer last September?’
Blank looks. A couple of the guys shake their heads. The rest don’t even bother, just go back to whatever they were doing.
I swivel my chair back around to face Steve.
He says, ‘Maybe whoever ran the search isn’t on shift. Or . . .’ He does some noncommittal thing with his head.
‘Or maybe he wouldn’t give me the steam off his piss if I was dying of thirst. I know.’ I hate when Steve gets tactful. ‘Or else it was a personal one, on the QT.’
It happens, a lot. You don’t like the cut of the young fella your daughter brought home, or the couple who viewed your rental flat: you run them through the computer, see if anything pops up. We’ve all done it – my ma wasn’t happy about her new neighbour, who did turn out to be a smackhead but at least not a dealer, and he moved out a few weeks later anyway, believe me – and anyone who gets outraged over it needs to get out more, but the fact is it’s illegal. If someone’s cousin was thinking of hiring Aislinn, or if someone’s parents were thinking of asking the nice young lady next door to mind their spare key, all it would take is thirty seconds on the computer; just doing a harmless favour, no reason anyone should ever know. Now that she’s a murder victim, though, anyone who’s been running illegal checks on her is gonna get a bollocking from the gaffer and lose a couple of days’ holiday, minimum. No wonder no one’s jumping to put his hand up.
Steve says, lower, ‘Or else it was on the QT, but it wasn’t personal. That would fit with the gang thing. Say someone from Organised Crime wants to check her out without his squad knowing about it, for whatever reason, so he gets a mate in Murder to do it for him . . .’
I have trouble seeing a way that one could be harmless. The room feels tricky, twisted: corners warping out of shape, shadows flexing. I say, ‘And the mate’s never gonna tell us about it.’
Steve says, even lower, ‘I know a fella in Computer Crime. He should be able to find out what computer the request came from.’
‘What computer. Not who was using it. If we had individual logins, instead of this one-squad-one-password shite—’
‘You want me to get onto him anyway?’
‘No,’ I say. ‘Not yet.’ Everyone’s gone back to their conversations or their paperwork; no one is even looking at us. All the same, I wish I’d kept my big mouth shut.
The observation room is small and shitty. It has a sticky table, one lopsided chair and a water cooler that’s usually empty. There’s no window and the air vent hasn’t worked in years; if that was an interview room, the solicitors would start bitching about their clients’ right to breathe and it would get fixed pronto, but since no one cares about our breathing, the vent stays banjaxed. The place smells of sweat, years of spilled coffee, aftershave from guys who retired when me and Steve were in training, cigarette smoke from back before the ban. It’s worse in winter, when the heating brings out the full bouquet.
Breslin isn’t there yet. I throw my coat on the back of the chair – I don’t feel like leaving it in the squad room and having to wonder if someone’s wiped his dick on it – and head over to have a look at Rory Fallon. Steve moves in beside me, close enough to the one-way glass that our breath leaves mist.
Fallon looks younger than twenty-nine. He’s on the short side, maybe five eight, and slight with it. I could take him down one-handed, but all this took was one good punch, and even a wimp can get worked up enough for that. He’s got floppy brown hair that just got cut special for his big date, glasses with fake-tortoiseshell frames so old the plastic’s gone cloudy, a cream grandfather shirt tucked neatly into faded jeans, and fine, pointy features that make him look like either a lovely sensitive artiste or a wimp, depending on your perspective. He’s OK-looking, but he’s not what I was expecting Aislinn to go for, any more than Lucy is. I was all ready for a great big chunk of designer-label thicko who worked for an estate agent and couldn’t shut up about rugby. Rory looks like the kind of guy who thinks the good bit of a video game is when you’re exploring the terrain and admiring the state-of-the-art graphics, before you get to the crude part where you have to blow the baddies away.
‘A tenner says he cries,’ I say. Me and Steve have started doing this on domestics – gambling on the job is obviously a big no-no, but I manage to live with myself. Half of the suspects take one look at us and turn on the waterworks, and it makes me want to give them an almighty kick up the hole. I have to bite my tongue to stop myself telling them to man – or woman – the fuck up: you were big and tough when you beat your other half to pulp and splinters, where’s all the attitude now? If I have to put up with that shite, I figure I might as well make a few quid out of it.
‘Ah, arse,’ Steve says. ‘I hope I’ve got a tenner. Look at the state of him.’