4
And that was about as much as we were going to get out of Fiona that day. Calming her down would have taken a lot more time than we had to spare. The extra uniform had arrived; I told him to get names and numbers—family, friends, workplaces, workmates, going right back to when Fiona and Jenny and Pat were in nappies—take Fiona to the hospital, and make sure she knew not to open her mouth around the media. Then we handed her over. She was still crying.
I had my mobile out and was dialing before we even turned away—radio would have been simpler, but too many journos and too many weirdos have scanners these days. I got Richie by the elbow and drew him down the road. The wind was still coming off the sea, wide and fresh, raking Richie’s hair into tufts; I tasted salt on my mouth. Where the footpaths should have been, there were thin dirt tracks in the uncut grass.
Bernadette got me through to the uniform who was at the hospital with Jenny Spain. He was about twelve, he was from some farm somewhere and he was the anal type, which was what I needed. I gave him his orders: once Jennifer Spain got out of surgery, if she made it that far, she needed a private room, and he needed to guard the door like a Rottweiler. No one was getting into that room without showing ID, no one was going in there unaccompanied, and the family wasn’t going in at all. “The victim’s sister is going to be heading down there any minute, and their mother will show up sooner or later. They don’t go into the room.” Richie was hovering and chewing on a thumbnail, head bent over the phone, but that made him glance up at me. “If they want an explanation, and they will, you don’t tell them these are my orders. You apologize, you say this is standard procedure and you’re not authorized to breach it, and you keep saying the same thing over and over till they back off. And get yourself a comfy chair, old son. You could be there for a while.” I hung up.
Richie squinted up at me, against the light. “You think that’s overkill?” I asked.
He shrugged. “If it’s true, what the sister was saying—about the break-in—it’s pretty creepy, all right.”
I said, “You figure that’s why I’m going high security? Because the sister’s story is creepy?”
He stepped back, hands going up, and I realized my voice had risen. “I just meant—”
“As far as I’m concerned, chum, there’s no such thing as creepy. Creepy is for kids on Halloween. I’m making sure all my bases are covered. How stupid do you think we’d look if someone waltzed into that hospital and finished the job? You want to explain that one to the media? Or, come to that, do you want to explain yourself to the Super if tomorrow’s front page is a close-up of Jenny Spain’s injuries?”
“No.”
“No. Neither do I. And if it takes a little overkill to avoid that, then so be it. Now let’s get you inside before the big bad wind freezes your itty-bitty bollix off, shall we?”
Richie kept his mouth shut till we were heading back up the Spains’ drive. Then he said, carefully, “The family.”
“What about them?”
“You don’t want them seeing her?”
“No, I don’t. Did you spot the one big piece of actual info Fiona gave us, in with all your creepy stuff?”
He said, unwillingly, “She had the keys.”
“Yeah,” I said. “She had the keys.”
“She’s in bits. Maybe I’m a sucker, but that looked genuine to me.”
“Maybe it is and maybe it isn’t. All I know is, she had the keys.”
“‘They’re great, they love each other, they love the kids . . .’ She talked like they were still alive.”
“So? If she can fake the rest, she can fake that. And her relationship with her sister wasn’t as simple as she’s trying to make out. We’ll be spending a lot more time with Fiona Rafferty.”
“Right,” Richie said, but when I pushed the door open he hung back, fidgeting on the doormat and rubbing the back of his head. I asked, making sure the edge was gone out of my voice, “What’s up?”
“The other thing she said.”
“What’s that?”
“Bouncy castles aren’t cheap. My sister wanted to rent one for my niece’s Communion. Couple of hundred squid.”
“Your point?”
“Their financial situation. In February Patrick gets laid off, right? In April, they’re still flush enough that they’re getting Emma a bouncy castle for her birthday party. But by somewhere around July, they’re too skint to change the locks, even though Jenny thinks someone’s been in the gaff.”
“So? Patrick’s redundancy money was running out.”
“Yeah, probably. That’s what I mean. And running out faster than it should’ve done. A good few of my mates are after losing their jobs. All of them who’d been at the same place a few years, they got enough to keep them going for a good while, if they were careful.”
“What are you thinking? Gambling? Drugs? Blackmail?” In this country’s vice league, booze has all of those beat hands down, but booze doesn’t wipe out your bank account in a few months flat.
Richie shrugged. “Maybe, yeah. Or maybe they just kept spending like he was still earning. A couple of my mates did that, too.”
I said, “That’s your generation. Pat and Jenny’s generation. Never been broke, never seen this country broke, so you couldn’t imagine it, even when it started happening in front of your eyes. It’s a good way to be—a lot better than my generation: half of us could be rolling in the stuff and we’d still get paranoid about owning two pairs of shoes, in case we wound up on the side of the road. But it’s got its downside.”
Inside the house the techs were working away: someone called out something that ended in “. . . Got any extra?” and Larry shouted back cheerfully, “I do of course, check in my . . .”
Richie nodded. “Pat Spain wasn’t expecting to be broke,” he said, “or he wouldn’t’ve blown the dosh on the bouncy castle. Either he was positive he’d have a new job by the end of summer, or he was positive he’d have some other way of bringing in the cash. If it started hitting him that that wasn’t happening, and the money was running out . . .” He reached out to touch the broken edge of the door with one finger, drew his hand back in time. “That’s some serious pressure for a man, knowing he can’t look after his family.”
I said, “So your money’s still on Patrick.”
Richie said carefully, “My money’s nowhere till we see what Dr. Cooper thinks. I’m only saying.”
“Good. Patrick’s the favorite, all right, but we’ve got plenty of fences left; plenty of room for an outsider to come up and take it. So the next thing we want to do is see if we can get anyone to narrow the field. I suggest we start with a quick chat to Cooper, before he heads, then go see if the neighbors have anything good for us. By the time we’re done there, Larry and his merry men should be able to give us some kind of update, and they should have the upstairs clear enough that we can go rooting around, try and pick up a few hints about why the money might have been running out. How does that sound to you?”
He nodded. “Nice catch on the bouncy castle,” I said, giving him a pat on the shoulder. “Now let’s go see what Cooper can do to the odds.”
*
The house was a different place: that miles-deep silence had vanished, blown away like fog, and the air was lit up and buzzing with efficient, confident work. Two of Larry’s lot were working their way methodically through the blood spatter, one of them dropping swabs into test tubes while the other one took Polaroids to pinpoint where each swab had come from. A skinny girl with too much nose was moving around with a video camera. The print guy was peeling tape off a window handle; the mapper was whistling between his teeth while he sketched. Everyone was going at a steady pace that said they were in for a long haul.
Larry was in the kitchen, squatting over a cluster of yellow evidence markers. “What a mess,” he said, with relish, when he saw us. “We’re going to be here forever. Did you come into this kitchen, when you were here before?”
“We stopped at the door,” I said. “The uniforms were in here, though.”
“Of course they were. Don’t let them go off duty without giving us their shoe prints, for elimination.” He straightened up, pressing a hand to the small of his back. “Ow, bollix, I’m getting too old for this job. Cooper’s upstairs with the kids, if you want him.”
“We won’t interrupt him. Any sign of the weapon?”
Larry shook his head. “Nada.”
“How about a note?”
“Does ‘Eggs, tea, shower gel’ count? Because otherwise, no. If you’re thinking this fella here, though”—a nod at Patrick—“you know as well as I do, a lot of men don’t. Strong silent types to the end.”
Someone had turned Patrick onto his back. He was white and slack-jawed, but you get the knack of seeing past that: he had been a good-looking guy, square chin and straight eyebrows, the type girls go for. I said, “We don’t know what we’re thinking. Find anything unlocked? Back door, a window?”
“Not so far. The security wasn’t bad, you know. Strong locks on the windows, double glazing, proper lock on the back door—not the type you can get past with a credit card. I’m not trying to do your job for you, or anything, but I’m just saying: not the easiest house to break into, specially without leaving marks.”
Larry’s money was on Patrick too. “Speaking of keys,” I said, “let me know if you find any. We should have at least three sets of house keys. And keep an eye out for a pen that says Golden Bay Resort. Hang on—”
Cooper was picking his way down the hall like it was dirty, holding his thermometer in one hand and his case in the other. “Detective Kennedy,” he said, resignedly, like he had been hoping against hope that I would somehow vanish off the case. “And Detective Curran.”
“Dr. Cooper,” I said. “I hope we’re not interrupting.”
“I have just completed my preliminary examinations. The bodies may now be removed.”
“Can you provide us with any new information?” One of the things that pisses me off about Cooper is that when he’s around I end up talking like him.
Cooper held up his case and raised his eyebrows at Larry, who said cheerfully, “You can stick that by the kitchen door, nothing interesting going on over there.” He put the case down delicately and bent to put away his thermometer.
“Both children appear to have been smothered,” he said. I felt Richie’s fidgeting go up a gear, at my shoulder. “This is virtually impossible to diagnose definitively, but the absence of any obvious injuries or symptoms of poisoning inclines me towards oxygen deprivation as the cause of death, and they show no evidence of choking, no marks of ligature strangulation and none of the congestion and conjunctival hemorrhaging usually associated with manual strangulation. The Technical Bureau will need to examine the pillows for signs of saliva or mucus indicating that they were pressed over the victims’ faces”—Cooper glanced at Larry, who gave him the thumbs-up—“although, given that the pillows in question were on the victims’ beds, the presence of bodily fluids would hardly constitute a smoking gun, so to speak. On post-mortem examination—which will begin tomorrow morning at precisely six o’clock—I will attempt to further narrow down the possible mechanisms of death.”
I said, “Any sign of sexual assault?” Richie jerked like I was electric. Cooper’s eyes slid over my shoulder to him for a second, amused and disdainful.
“On preliminary examination,” he said, “there are no signs of sexual abuse, either recent or chronic. I will, of course, explore this possibility in more depth at the post-mortem.”
“Of course,” I said. “And this victim here? Can you give us anything?”
Cooper pulled a sheet of paper out of his case and waited, inspecting it, till Richie and I went over to him. The paper was printed with two outlines of a generic male body, front and back. The first one was speckled with a precise, terrible Morse code of red-pen dots and dashes.
Cooper said, “The adult male received four injuries to the chest from what appears to be a single-edged blade. One”—he tapped a horizontal red line halfway up the left side of the outline’s chest—“is a relatively shallow slash wound: the blade struck a rib near the midline and skidded outwards along the bone for approximately five inches, but does not appear to have penetrated farther. While this would have caused considerable bleeding, it would not have been fatal, even without medical treatment.”
His finger moved upwards, to three leaf-shaped red blots that made a rough arc from below the outline’s left collarbone down to the center of its chest. “The other major injuries are puncture wounds, also from a single-edged blade. This one penetrated between the upper left ribs; this one struck the sternum; and this one entered the soft tissue by the edge of the sternum. Until the post-mortem is complete I cannot, of course, state the depths or trajectories of the wounds or describe the damage they caused, but unless the assailant was exceptionally strong, the blow directly to the sternum is unlikely to have done more than possibly flay off a chip of bone. I think we can safely posit that either the first or the third of these injuries is the one that caused death.”