‘You think he believed you?’
I shrug. ‘I don’t really care. If he didn’t, he just thinks I’m a narky bitch, and he thought that anyway. He was looking for an excuse to be buddies with me again; I gave him one. We’re good.’
We’re at the car pool. Just in that short walk, I’ve spotted eleven tall guys in dark overcoats. Every one made me feel more like a paranoid idiot, but the whole bunch of them can’t scrub away the prickle of warning when I think of the guy at the top of my road.
Steve says, in the gateway, ‘What do we do?’
What we need to do, just for starters, is pull Breslin’s and McCann’s financials, pull their phone records, and have someone turn their computers inside out to find out if they’ve been accessing anything they shouldn’t be. None of which is gonna happen. ‘Keep working our case. Keep talking to them. Keep our mouths shut.’ I wave to the guy who runs the car pool; he waves back and turns to look for the Kadett’s keys. ‘And I’m gonna see if I can make Breslin eat a bug.’
Aislinn’s gaff has been processed hard. When there’s someone coming home to a place, we try not to wreck it too badly – print dust gets wiped away, books go back on shelves – unless we actually want to shake people up; but when no one’s coming home, we don’t bother breaking out the sensitivity. Sophie’s lot covered half the house in black print dust and the other half in white, carved away a rough rectangle of carpet where Aislinn’s body was lying, sawed a long chunk out of the fireplace surround, stripped the bed and sliced gaping holes out of the mattress. In a cosy messy family home that stuff looks nightmarish, against nature, but Aislinn’s house barely looked like a real person’s gaff to start with; now it looks like a Tech Bureau teaching unit.
Steve takes the sitting room and the bathroom, I have the kitchen and the bedroom. It’s quiet. Steve whistles to himself, and the odd sound trickles in from the street outside – a bunch of old ones happily bitching their way past, a kid howling – but not a squeak or a bump out of the neighbours; these old walls are thick. Unless there was a blazing row or a scream, there’s no way the neighbours would have heard anything. A stealth boyfriend, one who’d been to her place before, he would’ve known that.
The search gives me nothing relevant. Your standard hiding places – packet of peas in the freezer, emptied-out canister in the spice rack, under the mattress, inside shoes – are blank. No love notes in the curly-wurly dressing table, no spare pair of morning-after boxers in the chest of drawers. In the wardrobe, no envelope of cash or package of brown waiting to be picked up; the best I come up with is a bunch of family photo albums shoved to the back of the top shelf, behind the spare duvet. I take a look, see if they give me any hints on where I saw Aislinn before, but no. She wasn’t a good-looking kid: chunky, with skinned-back plaits, a bumpy forehead and an uncomfortable smile. For someone who put this much gym time and celery and hair products into looking the way Aislinn looked, that would be plenty of reason to hide the albums. There’s no family pics up around the gaff, either; pukey fabric-prints of flowers and gingham chickens go on her walls, but her family goes at the back of the wardrobe. A shrink would love that – Aislinn wanted to bury her parents as revenge for abandoning her, or she had to bury her real self so she could reinvent herself as Dream Date Barbie – but all I care about is that no one else in any of the photos looks familiar. Wherever I saw Aislinn, her gaff isn’t gonna give me any hints.
The weird part is that I’m turning up nothing irrelevant, either. The search always has a surprise or two for you, because everyone’s got a couple of things they hide even from their nearest and dearest; the only question is whether the surprises have anything to do with the case. But there’s nothing here that Lucy didn’t give us – in fact, since I’ve found zero evidence of any secret boyfriend, there’s actually less here than Lucy gave us. No dodgy internet diet pills, no niche sex toys, I haven’t even found that copy of The Rules. The biggest revelation is that Aislinn sometimes wore padded bras.
‘Her paperwork’s in shite shape,’ Steve says, in the bedroom doorway. ‘Everything’s thrown together in a big box under the side table: bank statements, bills, receipts, the lot.’
I shove the albums back on the wardrobe shelf. ‘Gaffney’s pulling the financials; we’ll go through them that way. Bring back the box anyway. We need to check the receipts, in case the guy who delivered the sofa got a fixation. Anything interesting?’
‘Her will. DIY job, on a form printed off the internet. She left half of everything to Lucy, the other half to provide respite for child carers. Who knows if it’ll stand up to probate.’
‘Lucky for Lucy she’s got an alibi.’
‘Yeah,’ Steve says. ‘It’s dated two months ago.’
‘So maybe Aislinn was starting to worry that she was over her head in something dodgy, or maybe she just figured it was time she got all grown-up and had a will. Anything else?’
‘She had a first-time passport application form, filled in. Photo and all. Ready to go.’
‘So she wanted a sun holiday. Don’t we all.’
Steve says, ‘Or she knew she might have to get out of the country sometime soon.’
‘Maybe.’ I slam the wardrobe door. ‘That’s it? No escort appointment book? No wad of cash inside the sofa? No guy deodorant in the bathroom cabinet?’
He shakes his head. ‘You?’
‘Fuck-all.’
We look at each other, across the pretty daisy-patterned carpet and the slashed bed. ‘Well,’ Steve says, after a moment. ‘Maybe the pubs’ll give us something.’
We come away with the box of paperwork, to dump in the back of the Kadett before we canvass the pubs, and not a lot else. Me and Steve give good search, but I feel like Aislinn snuck something right past us, and no matter how many times I think back, I can’t figure out what or where it could be.
I underestimated barmen and Aislinn, and possibly overestimated her bit on the side. The first few pubs we try, Steve gets blank looks and head-shakes, while I hold up my notebook all ready to take nonexistent notes and give him the told-you-so eyebrow. But the barman in Ganly’s – a back-alley dive, ratty enough that it’s managed to avoid the hipsters looking for authenticity and hang on to its clientele of huddled old fellas in saggy jackets – takes one look at the photo and taps Aislinn’s face. ‘Yeah. She was in.’