Steve types up our report for the gaffer while I go through the stuff the floaters brought back. They’re all competent enough, although Deasy can’t spell and Gaffney feels the need to share every detail of everything, relevant or not (‘Witness advised that she was taking her daughter Ava aged eight to visit her grandfather in St James’s Hospital after severe stroke and saw Murray getting out of car . . .’). Nothing particularly interesting in the door-to-door: Aislinn was friendly with her neighbours – no bad blood over noise or parking spaces, nothing like that – but not close to any of them; a few of them saw a woman matching Lucy’s description going into or out of her house now and then; none of them ever saw any other visitors. Aislinn never mentioned a boyfriend. They saw her going out semi-regularly in the evenings, all dolled up, but they weren’t on gossip-swapping terms and they have no idea where she was heading or what she did there. The old couple in Number 24 are half deaf and heard nothing last night; the young couple in Number 28 heard Aislinn blasting her Beyoncé, but they say she turned the music either down or off a little before eight – they could pinpoint it because eight is the baby’s bedtime, so they appreciated the volume control. After that, not a sound.
The old fella in Number 3 backs Rory’s story, or bits of it: he was heading out to walk his dog (a white male terrier named Harold, according to Gaffney) just before eight o’clock last night, and he saw a guy matching Rory’s description turning in to Viking Gardens. When he got back fifteen minutes later, the guy was still there, down at the bottom of the road, messing about with his phone. None of the other neighbours were outside in those fifteen minutes – Viking Gardens is mostly old people and a few young families, no one heading out on the Saturday-night batter – which means Rory could have been let into the house, killed Aislinn, and been back outside texting up a cover story by ten past eight; but I don’t buy it. The part that turned him twitchy was earlier, before the Tesco side-trip. None of the neighbours were out in the road then, to see him or not.
Steve is still typing. Breslin’s headed off for his chats with Rory’s brothers, taking Gaffney with him and dispensing wisdom all the way; Meehan has buttoned his overcoat to the neck and gone off to time himself wandering around Stoneybatter, Deasy’s having a laugh with his contact at the phone company, Stanton’s laying down the law to someone from the buses. Their voices wander around the high corners of the room, turning blurry at the edges from too much space. The windows are dark.
My phone rings. ‘Conway,’ I say.
O’Kelly says, ‘You and Moran, my office. I want an update.’
‘We’ll be right in,’ I say, and hear him hang up. I look at Steve, who’s slumped in his chair, giving his report a last once-over. ‘The gaffer wants to see us.’
Steve’s head comes up and he blinks at me. Each of those takes a few seconds; he’s two-thirds asleep. For once he looks his age. ‘Why?’
‘He wants an update.’
‘Oh, Jaysus.’ The gaffer wants in-person updates when you’re working a big one, which this isn’t, or when you’re taking too long to get a solve, which even if you’re in his bad books should be longer than one day. This can’t be good.
The rumours say I got this gig because O’Kelly needed to tick the token boxes and I tick two for the price of one – and those are the nice rumours. All of them are bullshit. When the gaffer brought me on board, he was down a D – one of his top guys had just put in his papers early – and I was Missing Persons’ shining star, waving a sheaf of fancy high-profile solves in each hand. I was fresh off a headline-buster where I’d whipped out every kind of detective work in the book, from tracing phone pings and wi-fi logons to coaxing info out of family members and bullying it out of friends, in order to track down a newly dumped dad who had gone on the run with his two little boys, and then I’d spent four hours talking him into coming out of his car with the kids instead of driving the lot of them off a pier. I was hot stuff, back then. Me and the gaffer both had every reason to think this was gonna be great.
O’Kelly knows what’s been going down, I know he knows, but he’s never said a word; just watched and waited. No gaffer wants this on his squad, wants the sniping in corners and the grey poison smog hanging over the squad room. Any gaffer in the world would be wondering, by now, how he could get rid of me.
Steve hits Print on the report; the printer gets to work with a smug purr, nothing like the half-dead wheeze off the squad-room yoke. We find our combs, sort our hair, brush down our jackets. Steve has something blue smudged on his shirt front, but I don’t have the heart to tell him, in case the effort of trying to clean it off kills him. I assume I’ve got whiteboard marker on my face, or something, and he’s doing the same for me.
One of the reasons I don’t trust O’Kelly is because of his office. It’s full of naff crap – a framed crayon drawing that says world’s best granddad, pissant local golf trophies, a shiny executive toy in case he gets the urge to make clicky noises with swingy balls – and stacks of dusty files that never move. The whole room says he’s some outdated time-server who spends the day practising his golf swing and polishing his nameplate and working out fussy ways to tell if someone’s touched his stash bottle of single malt. If O’Kelly was that, he wouldn’t have been running Murder for coming up on twenty years. The office has to be window dressing, to put people off their guard. And the only people who see it are the squad.
O’Kelly is leaning back in his fancy ergonomic chair, with his arms draped on its arms, like some banana-republic dictator granting an audience. ‘Conway. Moran,’ he says. ‘Tell me about Aislinn Murray.’
Steve holds out the report the way you would wave raw meat at a mean dog. O’Kelly jerks his chin at his desk. ‘Leave that there. I’ll read it later. Now I want to hear it from you.’
He hasn’t told us to sit – which has to be a good sign: this isn’t going to take all night – so we stay standing. ‘We’re still waiting on the post-mortem,’ I say, ‘but Cooper’s preliminary says someone punched her in the face and she hit the back of her head on the fireplace. She was expecting a guy called Rory Fallon over for dinner. He admits he was on the spot at the relevant time, but he says she didn’t answer her door and he hadn’t a clue she was dead till we told him this afternoon.’
‘Huh,’ O’Kelly says. The hard sideways light from his desk lamp throws heavy shadows across his face, turning him one-eyed and unreadable. ‘Do you believe him?’
I shrug. ‘Half and half. Our main theory is she did answer her door, they had some kind of argument and Fallon threw the punch. He could be telling the truth about not knowing she was dead, though.’
‘Got any hard evidence?’
Less than twelve hours in, and I’m taking shit for not having a DNA match. I dig my hands into my jacket pockets so I won’t slap O’Kelly’s stupid spider plant off his desk.
Steve says, before I can answer, ‘The Bureau have the coat and gloves Fallon says he was wearing last night, and we’re searching his route home in case he ditched anything. He gave consent for us to search his flat and take any other clothes that look interesting, so a couple of the lads are on that. According to the techs, if he’s our guy we’ve got a good chance at blood or epithelials, or a fibre match to what they found on the body.’
‘I’ve asked a mate in the Bureau to put a rush on his stuff,’ I say, keeping my voice level. ‘We should have something preliminary tomorrow. We’ll let you know.’
O’Kelly matches up his fingertips and watches us. He says, ‘Breslin thinks ye need to quit wasting everyone’s time and arrest the little scumbag.’
I say, ‘It’s not Breslin’s case.’
‘Meaning what? You’ve got doubts? Or you just want to show everyone that Breslin’s not the boss of you?’
‘If anyone’s stupid enough to think Breslin’s the boss of us, I’m not gonna waste my time proving they’re wrong.’