The Super had come through for me: he had got the Tech Bureau to send out Larry Boyle, with a photographer and a scene mapper and a couple of others in tow. Boyle is a round, pancake-faced little oddball who gives you the impression that he has a room at home packed with disturbing magazines, neatly alphabetized, but he runs a scene impeccably and he’s the best we’ve got on blood spatter. I was going to need both of those.
“Well, about time,” he told me. He was already in his white hooded boiler suit, with his gloves and overshoes hanging ready from one hand. “Who’s this we’ve got here?”
“My new partner, Richie Curran. Richie, this is Larry Boyle from the Bureau. Be nice to him. We like him.”
“Stop that carry-on till we see if I’m any use to you,” Larry said, batting a hand at me. “What’s in there?”
“Father and two kids, dead. The mother’s gone to hospital. The kids were upstairs and it looks like suffocation, the adults were downstairs and it looks like stabbing. We’ve got enough blood spatter to keep you happy for weeks.”
“Oh, lovely.”
“Don’t say I never did anything for you. Apart from the usual, I’m looking for whatever you can tell me about the progression of events—who was attacked first, where, how much moving around they did afterwards, what the struggle might have looked like. As far as we could see, there’s no blood upstairs, which could be significant. Can you check for us?”
“No problem to me. Any more special requests?”
I said, “There was something very weird going on in that house, and I’m talking about well before last night. We’ve got a bunch of holes in the walls, and no clue who made them or why—if you can find us any indications, fingerprints or anything, we’d be very grateful. We’ve also got a load of baby monitors—at least two audio and five video, going by the chargers on the bedside table, but there could be more. We’re not sure what they were for yet, and we’ve only located three of the cameras: upstairs landing, sitting-room side table, kitchen floor. I’d like photos of all of them in situ. And we need to find the other two cameras, or however many there are. Same for the viewers: we’ve got two charging, two on the kitchen floor, so we’re short at least one.”
“Mmm,” Larry said, with relish. “In-teresting. Thank God for you, Scorcher. One more bedsit overdose and I think I’d have died of boredom.”
“I’m thinking we could have a drug connection here, actually. Nothing definite, but I’d love to know if there are drugs in that house, or if there used to be.”
“Oh, God, not drugs again. We’ll swab anything that looks promising, but I’ll be only delighted if it turns up negative.”
“I need their mobiles, I need any financial paperwork you run across, and there’s a computer in the kitchen that’ll need going over. And give the attic a good once-over for me, will you? We haven’t been up there, but whatever was weird, it involved the attic somehow. You’ll see what I mean.”
“Now that’s more like it,” Larry said happily. “I love a bit of weird. Shall we?”
I said, “That’s the injured woman’s sister, in the uniforms’ car. We’re about to go have a chat with her. Can you hold off another minute, until we’ve got her out of view? I don’t want her seeing you guys heading in, just in case she loses the plot.”
“I have that effect on women. Not a bother; we’ll hang on here till you give us the nod. Have fun, boys.” He waved us good-bye with his overshoes.
Richie said grimly, as we headed back down the road towards the sister, “He won’t be so cheerful once he’s been inside that house.”
I said, “He will, though, old son. He will.”
*
I don’t feel sorry for anyone I run across via work. Pity is fun, it lets you have a great wank about what a wonderful guy you are, but it does bugger-all good to the people you’re feeling sorry for. The second you start getting gooey about what they’ve been through, your eye comes off the ball. You get weak. Next thing you know, you can’t get out of bed in the morning because you can’t face going in to work, and I have trouble seeing how that does anyone any good. I put my time and energy into bringing answers, not hugs and hot chocolate.
If I was going to feel sorry for someone, though, it would be the vics’ families. Like I said to Richie, ninety-nine percent of the vics have nothing to complain about: they got exactly what they went looking for. The families, about the same percentage of the time, never asked for anything like this kind of hell. I don’t buy the idea that it’s all Mummy’s fault if Little Jimmy turns into a junkie smack dealer dumb enough to rip off his own supplier. Maybe she didn’t exactly help him self-actualize, but my childhood left me with a few issues too, and did I wind up taking two in the back of the head from a pissed-off drug lord? I spent a couple of years seeing a counselor, to make sure those issues weren’t going to hold me back, and meanwhile I got on with things, because I’m a grown man now and that means my life is up to me. If I turn up one morning with my face blown off, that’s all mine. And my family, for no good reason in the world, would be left picking out shrapnel.
I watch myself hardest of all around the families. Nothing can trip you up like compassion.
When she left home that morning, Fiona Rafferty had probably been a good-looking girl—I like them taller and a lot more groomed, myself, but there was a fine pair of legs in those faded jeans, and she had a good head of glossy hair, even if she hadn’t taken the trouble to straighten it or to color it something snazzier than plain mouse brown. Now, though, she was a mess. Her face was red and swollen and covered in great streaks of snot and mascara, her eyes had turned piggy from crying and she had been wiping her face on the sleeves of her red duffle coat. At least she had stopped screaming, for the moment anyway.
The uniform was starting to look frayed around the edges, too. I said, “We need a word with Ms. Rafferty. Why don’t you get onto your station, have them send someone out to take her to the hospital when we’re done?” He nodded and backed away. I heard the sigh of relief.
Richie went down on one knee beside the car. “Ms. Rafferty?” he said gently. The kid had bedside manner. Maybe a little too much: his knee was smack in a muddy rut and he was going to be spending the rest of the day looking like he had fallen over his own feet, but he didn’t seem to notice.
Fiona Rafferty’s head came up, slowly and wavering. She looked blind.
“I’m very sorry for your trouble.”
After a moment her chin tilted down, a tiny nod.
“Can we get you anything? Water?”
“I need to ring my mam. How do I— Oh, God, the babies, I can’t tell her—”
I said, “We’re getting someone to accompany you to the hospital. They’ll let your mother know to meet you there, and they’ll help you talk to her.”
She didn’t hear me; her mind had already flinched off that and ricocheted somewhere else. “Is Jenny OK? She’s going to be OK, right?”
“We’re hoping so. We’ll let you know as soon as we hear anything.”
“The ambulance, they wouldn’t let me go with her—I need to be with her, what if she, I need to—”
Richie said, “I know. The doctors are looking after her, though. They know what they’re at, those lads. You’d only get in their way. You don’t want that, no?”
Her head rocked from side to side: no.
“No. And anyway, we need you to help us out here. We’ll need to ask you some questions. Would you be able for that now, do you think?”
Her mouth fell open and she gasped for air. “No. Questions, Jesus, I can’t— I want to go home. I want my mam. Oh, God, I want—”
She was on the verge of breaking down again. I saw Richie start to draw back, hands going up reassuringly. I said smoothly, before he threw her away, “Ms. Rafferty, if you need to go home for a little while and come back to us later on, we won’t stop you. It’s your choice. But for every minute we lose, our chances of finding the person who did this go down another notch. Evidence gets destroyed, witnesses’ memories get blurry, maybe the killer gets farther away. I think you should know that, before you make your decision.”
Fiona’s eyes were starting to focus. “If I . . . You could lose him? If I come back to you later, he could be gone?”
I moved Richie out of her eye line with a hard grip on his shoulder and leaned against the car door. “That’s right. Like I said, it’s your choice, but personally I wouldn’t want to live with that.”
Her face contorted and for a moment I thought she was gone, but she bit down hard on the inside of her cheek and pulled it together. “OK. OK. I can . . . OK. I just . . . Can I just take two minutes and have a cigarette? Then I’ll answer whatever you want.”
“I think you’ve made the right decision there. You take your time, Ms. Rafferty. We’ll be here.”
She pulled herself out of the car—clumsily, like someone standing up for the first time after surgery—and staggered off across the road, between the skeleton houses. I kept an eye on her. She found a half-built wall to sit on and managed to light her smoke.
Her back was to us, more or less. I gave Larry the thumbs-up. He waved cheerfully and came trundling towards the house, pulling his gloves on, with the rest of the techs trailing after him.
Richie’s crappy jacket wasn’t made for country weather; he was bouncing up and down with his hands in his armpits, trying not to look frozen. I said, keeping my voice down, “You were about to send her home. Weren’t you?”
He whipped his head around, startled and wary. “I was, yeah. I thought—”
“You don’t think. Not about something like that. Whether to cut a witness loose is my call, not yours. Do you understand?”
“She looked like she was about to lose it.”
“So? That’s not a reason to let her leave, Detective Curran. That’s a reason to make her pull it together. You almost threw away an interview that we can’t afford to lose.”
“I was trying not to throw it away. Better get it in a few hours’ time than upset her so bad we might not get her back till tomorrow.”
“That’s not how it works. If you need a witness to talk, you find a way to make her do it, end of story. You don’t send her home to have a bloody cup of tea and a biscuit and come back when it suits her.”
“I figured I should give her the choice. She just lost—”
“Did you see me putting handcuffs on the girl? Give her all the choice in the world. Just make damn sure she chooses the way you want her to. Rule Number Three, and Four and Five and about a dozen more: you do not go with the flow in this job. You make the flow go with you. Do I make myself clear?”
After a moment Richie said, “Yeah. I’m sorry, Detective. Sir.”