‘I’m not . . .’ Rory blinks fast. The strain and the airless room are getting to him; he’s starting to have a hard time keeping up. ‘Can’t you just take these? They’re the ones I was wearing last night, if that’s—’
‘See, though,’ Steve explains, ‘we’re not just trying to take this particular coat off our list. We’re trying to take you off our list. That means we need anything you could’ve worn, not just what you did wear. See what I mean?’
Rory pushes up his glasses to press his fingers into the corners of his eyes. ‘Yes. OK. Whatever you need. I’d rather be there, though – when you’re in my apartment. I don’t like the thought of people . . . Is that all right?’
‘Not a problem,’ Steve says easily. ‘The lads who bring you home can just take a quick look around while they’re at it. We’ll get on that as fast as we can, yeah? Get your prints done and get you out of here, back to your day.’
Rory’s eyes close, against his fingertips. ‘Yes,’ he says. ‘I’d like that very much.’
I toss Rory’s gloves and his coat into evidence bags and head off to send them to Sophie, before he can change his mind. Then I type up his statement, and ignore the squad-room turds ignoring me, while Steve prints off a map so Rory can draw us his route home – as near as he can remember, or wants to – and takes him through his story one more time. I give the two of them as much alone time as we can afford, in case Rory’s still holding a grudge against me, but when I come back into the interview room Steve throws me a minuscule shake of his head: nothing interesting has happened.
‘Here,’ Rory says, pushing the map across the table. He’s looking rough. His lips are parched and the mousy hair is plastered flat to his head, like he’s been running in heat. ‘Is that OK?’
There’s a careful line winding from Stoneybatter to Ranelagh, and a tiny tidy X labelled ‘FLOWERS’ on the quays. ‘That’s great,’ Steve says. ‘Thanks a million.’
‘Have a read of that,’ I say, holding out the statement and a pen. ‘If it’s all correct, initial every page and then sign at the end.’
Rory doesn’t move to take the statement. ‘Do you think . . .’ He catches a long breath. ‘If I hadn’t left when I did. If I’d kept banging on the door, or if I’d called the police, or if I’d broken in. Would I have been able to save her?’
I almost say yes. If he’s not our guy, he’s such a godawful damp weenie, the kind who needs regular slaps across the back of the head just to keep him from vanishing up his own hole, plus he just wasted half our day by being in the wrong place looking guilty as hell. All I have to do is say yes, and he’ll spend the rest of his life whipping himself with a more and more elaborate fantasy where he storms into that cottage in the nick of time and saves Aislinn from a herd of rampaging bikers and they live happily ever after and have 2.4 damp weenie kids. It’s practically irresistible.
But if he is our guy, he’s no idiot, and he’ll find a way to use any info I hand him. ‘No way to know,’ I say. ‘Here,’ and I dump the statement under his nose.
He reads it, or at least he spends a while staring at each page. At the end, he signs like he barely remembers how.
It’s headed for four o’clock. We get hold of the floaters who’ve been pulling CCTV footage – Kellegher and Reilly – and tell them what we want done with Rory and his gaff. Steve finds an old hoodie in his locker so Rory won’t freeze his delicate self on the way home. Then we tell him how great he is and hand him over.
‘You owe me a tenner,’ Steve says, as we watch Kellegher and Reilly walk him down the corridor. From the back, sandwiched between their farmer shoulders and their cop walks, Rory looks like a nerd being marched behind the school to get a few slaps.
I check that I’ve got all the statement pages. ‘Like fuck I do. Did you not see him bawling his eyes out there? Pay up.’
‘Doesn’t count. It has to be because he’s petrified of us, not because he just found out his girlfriend died.’
‘Since when?’ Steve is right, but I feel like yanking his chain. ‘Nah nah nah. You can’t make up the rules to suit—’
‘Since always. When did I ever try to get away with—’
‘When did I ever try to stiff you just because I didn’t like the timing of—’
Rory and the floaters are gone, in a jumble of footsteps echoing down the marble stairwell. I slam the interview-room door and we head for the squad room to get our stuff together. The corridor still feels like it’s twitching with covered pits and pointed sticks, but that doesn’t feel like such a bad thing, not any more.
Chapter 5
I used to love the first case meeting, love everything about it. The pulse of the incident room, everyone taut as greyhounds at the traps; in that room every answer comes in closer on top of the question, every glance snaps round faster. The whipcrack of the jobs being assigned, Murphy collect the CCTV footage, Vincent check gold Toyota Camrys, O’Leary talk to the girlfriend, bam bam bam. The moment when I’d shut my notebook and say Go, and we’d all be out of our seats and halfway to the door before my mouth closed on the word. I used to come out of that meeting feeling like the bastard we were after didn’t have a chance in hell. By this time, even the thought of it – floaters eyeing me up and down, wondering which of the rumours are true; me eyeing them back, wondering which of them is going to glom onto any slip-up, blow it up huge and barter it for a laugh and a pat on the back – turns me hangover-queasy and hangover-mean.
Incident Room C, but. I haven’t been in there since I was a floater chasing down pointless non-leads for the big boys; I’d forgotten. The white light exploding down from the high ceiling, skating and flashing on the whiteboard and the tall windows. The sleek computers lined up straining for action, the throb of them pumping at the air. The desks polished till they look like you could slice your thumb open on the edges. One step through the doorway, and that room blows the fatigue off me like dust and recharges me till I spark static. Walk in there and you could solve Jack the Ripper. And this time I’m no floater, there to jump when some big man snaps his fingers; this time I’m the big woman and every bit of this is all mine. Just for one second, that room blindsides me into loving the job, a hard green painful love like it’s growing from scratch all over again.
Steve’s lifted face, lips parted in a half-smile like a kid at the panto, says he feels the same way. That’s what smacks sense back into me. Steve falls arse over tip for anything beautiful, without bothering to think about how it got that way or why, or what’s underneath. I don’t.