Your sixth option is to find yourself a journalist, one who has balls the size of watermelons and doesn’t mind being pulled over for drink-driving every other day for the rest of his life, and go full-on whistleblower.
None of those sound good to me. I’m loving this chase, every second of it. I don’t give a damn whether that means I’m a bad person. But I know if we actually catch what we’re hunting, it’s probably gonna rip our faces off.
I’m having a hard time sitting still. Every few minutes I turn my head to look at Steve, sprawled over his desk like a student, fingers dug into that orange hair, frowning down at his whirlpool of paper. I can’t tell what’s going on in there. A couple of times I actually have my mouth open to ask him: If. What do we do if? Every time, I end up shutting my mouth again and going back to work.
The energy in an incident room usually dips in the middle of the afternoon, same as the energy in any office, but today it stays running high. Partly it’s the room, making us all want to prove we’re up to its standards, but partly it’s me. The mood comes from the top, and that dare is whirling in my mind like a bad-boy lover, speeding up my heartbeat every time it bobs to the surface, beckoning and menacing. The wicked grin of it keeps me working flat out, and when I finish fine-tooth-combing reports it keeps me up and moving around the room, adding to the whiteboard, grabbing tip-line sheets – some anonymous guy is positive he’s seen Aislinn on a very specialised website, stamping on bugs, which sounds unlikely but which the lucky people in Computer Crime will get to investigate anyway. I check out what the floaters are doing, toss out snippets of well-done and try-this – I can do the managerial shite just fine, when I feel like it. I have a laugh with Kellegher, tell Stanton and Deasy how their interviews with Aislinn’s colleagues were bang on. Breslin would be proud of me. The thought of him – he should be back soon – sets me circling again.
Steve’s caught it too: he’s on the phone, trying to light a fire under his Meteor guy for the full records on that unregistered phone. We could go out, burn off that fizz interviewing witnesses, but I don’t want to go anywhere. I don’t want to miss Breslin.
Gaffney has finished his list of Aislinn’s evening classes – which if I wasn’t in a good mood would be depressing as hell: Aislinn genuinely paid actual money for a class called ReStyle You!, with the exclamation mark, also for one on wine appreciation and something called Busy Babes Boot Camp – and he’s ringing round for lists of students. I take the financials off him and go through them for anomalies, while Breslin’s not there to look over my shoulder.
No unexplained sums of money into or out of Aislinn’s current account. The only thing that sticks out is that Lucy was right, Aislinn had a fair bit of cash: she opened a savings account the same month she started work, back in 2006, and most of her salary went straight in there. In the last couple of years she cut back on the saving and spent the extra on chichi clothes websites, but she still had over thirty grand stashed away. She wasn’t carrying any debt – the Greystones home paid for the Stoneybatter cottage and for her crappy second-hand Polo, and she paid off her credit card by direct debit. If she wanted to go travelling or go to college, she would have been well able to do it. She would also have been well able to lend someone a few grand, if someone had asked.
Rory’s financials are more complicated than Aislinn’s, what with the bookshop, and nowhere near as healthy. Nothing remotely dodgy-looking – if there are gangsters in this case, they aren’t laundering their cash through the Wayward Bookshop just to make our lives more interesting – but the business is barely keeping its head above water: in the five years Rory’s owned it, sales have dropped by a third and he’s had to let his part-timer go. The salary he’s taking would look scabby to a burger-flipper. Breslin wasn’t wrong about that Pestle dinner blowing the budget.
We’ve already seen how hard Rory takes humiliation. If he went begging to Aislinn and she slapped him down, his inner Hulk could well have burst his good going-out jumper.
I’m about to call Steve over for a look – he’s up at the whiteboard – when a skinny kid with tufty fair hair and a crap suit sticks his head round the incident-room door. ‘Um,’ he says. ‘Detective Conway?’
‘Yeah.’
He edges between the desks to me like he expects someone to grab him in a headlock halfway. ‘Detective O’Rourke sent me, from Missing Persons? Sorry it took so long; I’ve been downstairs for a while, actually, but some guy – um, I mean, another detective? – he told me you were out. He said I could give it to him, but Detective O’Rourke told me just you, so I was waiting? And then I thought maybe I should check, like just in case—’
‘I’m here now,’ I say. ‘Let’s have it.’
He vanishes again. I catch Steve’s eye as he turns from the whiteboard, jerk my head to say Over here. None of the floaters seem to be paying any attention, but I’m not gonna bank on that.
‘What’s up?’ Steve asks.
‘The file on Aislinn’s da. Don’t make a big deal of it.’
The kid reappears lugging a cardboard box that probably weighs more than he does. Steve leans over his half of the desk and messes with paper, ignoring him.
‘Oof,’ the kid says, dumping the box by my chair and staggering backwards. ‘And this.’ He pulls an envelope out of his pocket and hands it over.
‘Thanks,’ I say. ‘The guy who thought I was out: what’d he look like?’
The kid tries to disappear into his suit. I wait him out. ‘Um,’ he says, in the end. ‘Like, late forties? Five ten, average build? Dark hair, kind of curly, some grey? Stubble?’
Which sounds a whole lot like McCann.
There’s no good reason why McCann should give a damn what anyone’s sending me.
‘Great,’ I say. ‘I’ll have to let him know I’m in here this week. Thanks.’
The kid hovers hopefully, waiting for his pat on the head. ‘I’ll tell Detective O’Rourke you did a good job,’ I say. ‘Bye.’
He edges off. Steve says, ‘What guy who thought you were out?’
‘Someone tried to intercept this stuff.’ I know I sound paranoid. I don’t care. ‘McCann, by the sound of it.’
I watch Steve’s mind go through the same steps mine did. ‘Breslin doesn’t know we’re looking into Aislinn’s da.’
‘Right. McCann wasn’t after this, specifically; he was just going for it because it was there.’
Steve says, ‘Breslin’ll be back soon. You want to take this lot somewhere else?’
‘Fuck that.’ It won’t do any good – if Breslin gets in while we’re gone, someone’s gonna tell him we disappeared hauling a great big box of paper. And besides, this is my incident room. I’m fucked if I’m gonna scuttle off to some closet. ‘We’ll read fast.’