‘The secret guy Aislinn kept ditching Lucy for. The guy in the pub.’ Steve goes round to his side of the car and leans on the roof while I dig for my keys. ‘What if it wasn’t a boyfriend, after all? What if it was her dad? She tracks him down, they’re trying to rebuild their relationship—’
‘Ah, Jaysus. That does it.’ I want to floor it all the way to Rory Fallon’s gaff and arrest the hell out of him, before it can turn out that Aislinn was having heartwarming reunion rendezvous with Daddy and I have to listen to all the syrupy details. ‘That’s four quid you owe me. No’ – when Steve grins – ‘I’m gonna lose my bleeding mind if I have to put up with this if shite any longer. I don’t even want to think about Aislinn’s da until Gary rings back and gives us the actual story. Meanwhile, you’re not getting into this car till you give me my four quid.’
I jingle the keys and stare him out of it till he reaches into his pocket and shoves a fiver across the roof of the car. ‘Where’s my change?’ he demands, when I pocket the fiver and unlock the doors.
‘By the time we get back to HQ, you’ll owe it to me anyway. Get in.’
‘OK,’ Steve says, swinging himself into the car. ‘Might as well use it up now. So if the da wants to make up for years of not being there to protect Aislinn, and he doesn’t like the cut of Rory—’
‘Sweet fuck,’ I say, starting the Kadett and listening to it bitch about being woken up. ‘What if I pay you not to do this shite? Would that work?’
‘You should definitely give it a go. I take cheques.’
‘Do you take Snickers bars? Because at least you shut your gob when you’re eating.’
‘Ah, lovely,’ Steve says happily. ‘I’ll be good.’ I find the Snickers bar in my satchel and toss it into his lap, and he settles down to demolish it.
He doesn’t look like he’s thinking about what an inspiration I am, or what a tragic story. I know Steve is nowhere near the simple freckle-faced kid he plays on TV, but still: he looks like he’s thinking about chocolate.
‘What?’ he demands, through a mouthful.
‘Nothing,’ I say. ‘The bit of silence suits you, is all,’ and I catch myself grinning as I swing the car into the flow of traffic.
Chapter 8
We get back to an incident room full of nothing. Breslin is still out, presumably talking to Rory’s KAs; the floaters come in and out, fetching more nothing and dumping it on our big fancy desk. Stanton and Deasy turned up nothing at Aislinn’s work, no rumours of an affair with the boss or anyone else, no unrequited crushes either way, no office feuds, no stalkery clients. Meehan comes back from checking Rory’s route home to report that his times match the CCTV footage, meaning Rory didn’t take any major detours between Aislinn’s house and the last time he was caught on camera – although we’ve got no way of confirming what time he got home or what he did afterwards, so we can’t rule out a last-minute detour or a late-night excursion. Gaffney is running Aislinn’s KAs through the system, which spits out a load of traffic tickets, a couple of minor drug possession charges and one guy who smashed his brother’s windscreen with a Hoover. Reilly slouches in with more CCTV footage and a flat stare at me, settles down to watch some telly and occasionally lets out a noise halfway between a cough and a roar to remind us that he’s here and he’s bored.
I’m itching to look up Cueball Lanigan’s boys on the system, but I’m not gonna do it: I’d feel like a twat taking the gang thing that seriously, plus the search would be logged for anyone to find, just like we found the search someone ran on Aislinn last autumn. Instead I go through the statements from the door-to-door again, properly this time, looking for the little things that need following up. I’m not finding them – Gaffney went to town with the highlighter pen on one woman’s statement that she heard the guy in Number 15 roaring about killing someone a week or two back, but seeing as Number 15 has three teenagers, I figure we don’t need to break out the waterboarding equipment just yet. Steve cross-checks Aislinn’s phone records against her phone, and comes up with no discrepancies: no one’s been deleting texts or call logs, not Aislinn and not our guy. No calls or texts from unidentified numbers, either; every number is in her contacts list – and we’ll track down the contacts to make sure they are who the phone says they are – or else comes back to some customer service department. That has its good side – it’s a nice punch in the face for Steve’s cute little fantasy about an Aislinn-and-Daddy reunion – but I’d give a lot for just one text from an unregistered mobile saying Meet me for a shag by the heroin stash at 8.
Every investigation nets you plenty of nothing. You need that – it’s the only way you can narrow down your focus – and normally it feels good, slashing the dead ends off your whiteboard, leaving the live stuff to leap out at you big and bold. This time, though, there’s no slashing going on, just little bits of useless nothing splatting onto my desk like spitballs from some joker I can’t catch. That soaring buzz is turning to edginess, making me shift and knee-jiggle and rub away imaginary itches against the back of my chair. I need something, anything, that’ll zap away Steve’s great big fluffy cloud of if-based babble and leave me with the stuff solid enough to stand on. Incident Room C looks empty to the point of ridiculous, the half-dozen of us dotted around a room that would take thirty easily, the high ceiling and the shining rows of desks shrinking us to dollhouse size. I’m starting to wonder if Breslin was taking the piss out of us, getting the luxury suite for a two-cent case that would have fit in that ex-locker-room shithole with space left over.
At two o’clock we send Gaffney out for pizza, and Stanton pulls up one of the sob radio shows on his phone for lunchtime light relief. Sure enough, they’ve got a big segment about Aislinn, leading into a general outrage-fest about how the country is getting more dangerous for decent law-abiding citizens and the Guards don’t give a damn, complete with phone-ins from old ones who were mugged and left to die in pools of their own blood while uniforms stepped over them looking for a politician’s hole to lick. They even have Crowley on, being profound about how our cavalier attitude towards Aislinn’s murder and our oppressive bullying of geniuses like himself are both symbolic of the sickness of our society ‘on an almost mythic level’, whatever he thinks that means. For a minute there, while we all crease ourselves laughing, we forget what we think of each other.
‘My cousin went out with him for a while,’ Meehan says.
‘Your cousin’s got shite taste,’ Reilly tells him.
‘She does, yeah. She dumped him because he wouldn’t wear johnnies. He said they were a feminist conspiracy to suppress masculine energy.’
Everyone cracks up again. ‘Fucking beautiful,’ Stanton says, reaching to grab another slice. ‘I’m going to see if I can get away with that.’