Aislinn knew how to pick them. Her exes make Rory look like an entire theme park’s worth of thrills and spills. The first guy is an accountant for a software company that had a rough ride through the recession, going by the worn-out carpet and the water stains on the ceiling, but the buzz in the office says things are picking up. He met Aislinn in a sandwich queue when they were nineteen and went out with her for six months, but they both made it clear from the start that they weren’t looking for anything serious; when they got bored they drifted off in their separate directions, no hard feelings and no let’s-stay-friends. He remembers Lucy, vaguely, but they never had any problems and he can’t think of any reason why she would have a grudge against him. He’s nice-looking, in a forgettable way, and he seems like a nice guy; he says Aislinn was a nice girl, they had a nice time together, now he has a nice fiancée who he took for a nice dinner on Saturday night and he’s never even looked Aislinn up on Facebook.
The second ex is maybe half a notch less boring. He works in a call centre, in a massive corporate office building plonked down in a field in the middle of nowhere; someone’s genius business-park idea that got smashed in the crash, or someone’s carefully planned tax loss. Four of the five floors are empty; the fifth has a few dozen drones in one corner, talking too loud because there’s no one to be disturbed. For our chat, the guy brings me to some executive corner office, bare, with a film of dust covering the bed-sized desk. He met Aislinn through Lucy, five years back, when he was still trying to make it as a lighting operator. They had been going out for eight months, and he was starting to think this could be something special, when she dumped him. She said, and he believed her, that it was because she felt the same way: this was getting real, and what with looking after her sick mother, Aislinn didn’t have the spare time or energy for something real. No contact since, not till he saw her on the news two nights back. He drifted out of touch with Lucy, too, when he quit theatre; not on bad terms, they just weren’t particularly close to start with and didn’t bother hanging out any more. On Saturday evening he was at a gig – we’ll check the alibis, but I’m not expecting any surprises. The shock and the sadness and the tinge of wistful might-have-been ring true, but so does the distance: Aislinn was in this guy’s past. He wasn’t chasing her, looking to relight the fire, getting pissed off when he saw her preparing for a date that didn’t include him.
Which is exactly what I expected. The interviews were good ones; I Cool Girled the exes into opening up about stuff they never planned on spilling. None of it is any use to me.
I walk back to my car through wide cold hush, the sound of wind in long grass building up from farther away than I can see, rolling in across the empty fields, over me and on. Normally it would make me edgy – too much nature gives me the creeps – but at last my head has the wiped-clean clarity I was looking for in my run, this morning. For the first time in days, maybe months, I can think.
I can’t shake the feeling that it’s because I’ve run Steve out of it. Without him at my elbow – tugging and yammering and pointing in every direction, peppering me with bits of babble that might or might not mean something and I have to figure out which – I finally have room to see straight. Under all that, all the maybes and the mirages, there are only two things worth seeing.
Rory Fallon, the sad little wimp. He’s it; all there is to this case. That’s why it keeps spitting up great clots of nothing: because there’s nothing else to find.
And the second thing: this is my last case in Murder. I can outmanoeuvre Breslin and McCann and Roche and the whole foaming mob, for one more day, one more week, one more month; but sooner or later I’m going to put a toe wrong, and they’ll have me. I think of a boxer, ducking and weaving away from every punch, faster and faster, till one blink and bang, blackness.
I’m not going to wait for the knockout, give Breslin or Roche or whoever the chance to do his smirking lap of honour around me. I’m going on my own terms. I’ll finish this case and finish it right, tie Rory Fallon down so tight the best defence barrister in the country couldn’t wriggle him free, go out with my head up. Then I’ll ring my mate with the security firm and ask him if that job is still on the table. And somewhere in there, I’m gonna tell O’Kelly to fuck himself and punch Roche’s teeth in.
For a second I wonder whether, while I was getting everything else arseways, I could have got Steve wrong. I wonder – not that it matters now – if this is what he was trying to distract me from, all along; if he didn’t want me to notice that I was done. If the poor optimistic eejit actually liked working with me, just like I thought. If he had the same sappy daydreams, us taking down some Hannibal Lecter together without breaking a sweat, shooting our cuffs and swapping a nod and striding off to the next uncrackable case that needed the best of the best. The twinge that gives me is sharp enough that I hope I’m wrong.
The car is cold. Even after I slam the door, I can still hear that unceasing roll of wind through too much grass. Part of me wants to floor it out of there, but I can’t think of anything I’m in a hurry to reach.
When I get back to the incident room, Steve is still gone. The floaters are eating lunch and bitching about some news story bitching about cops. Breslin is at his desk, with his chair tilted back and his feet up, finishing a sausage roll and flicking through the Courier.
‘Ah,’ he says, bringing his chair legs down and tossing his paper on the desk, when he sees me. ‘Just the woman I’ve been waiting for. Been doing anything interesting?’
‘Aislinn’s exes,’ I say, peeling my coat off. ‘Nothing worth hearing. We’ll check the alibis and cross them off the list.’ The Courier’s front-page headline says who was coming to dinner? Someone’s told Crowley about Aislinn’s date.
Breslin swings his feet off his desk. ‘I need to stretch my legs after that,’ he says, patting his stomach. ‘Let’s go for a stroll.’
‘I’ve got notes to type up.’
‘They can wait.’ Lower: ‘I’ve got something that can’t.’
Maybe he’s gonna offer to cut me in on his imaginary sideline. I don’t bother putting much thought into whether to play along, seeing as it doesn’t matter either way, and his way gets me out of that incident room. ‘Why not,’ I say, and enjoy the flick of surprise on his face as I turn around and head back out the door.
‘So I talked to Rory’s exes,’ Breslin says, on our way down the corridor. I wonder where we’re going for his chat. It’s hit me this week, for the first time, how little privacy we all have from each other. People come and go in the canteen, the squad room, the locker room; the interview rooms have observation windows and audio feeds. I never realised before how you would need the squad to be part of you, close and reliable as your own body, in order to survive it.
‘And?’ I say.
Breslin grins. ‘How did he put it? His usual type is more “casual” than Aislinn? I’m sure they’re all very nice girls, but my God, I wanted to march the whole lot of them into some makeover show and tell the stylists to bring out the heavy artillery.’ He heads down the stairs at a jog. ‘You know those godawful hairy ethnic hoodies that students used to wear back in the nineties, to show you they were planning to go backpacking in Goa someday? I swear the last ex was actually wearing one of those.’
‘They give us anything?’