“Why would he do any of it? We’re talking about months of stalking, topped off with mass murder. Why pick this family? Why break in and do nothing worse than eat ham slices? Why break in again and bash the walls in? Why escalate to murder? Why take the risk of starting with the kids? Why suffocate them but stab the adults? Why any of it?”
Richie fished fifty cents out of the back pocket of the khakis and shrugged—he did it like a kid, shoulders jumping around his ears. “Maybe he’s mental.”
I stopped what I was doing. “Is that what you’re planning on putting in the file for the Director of Public Prosecutions? ‘I dunno, maybe he’s, like, totally mental’?”
Richie flushed, but he didn’t back down. “I don’t know what the doctors’d call it. But you know what I mean.”
“Actually, old son, I don’t. ‘Mental’ isn’t a reason. It comes in an awful lot of flavors, most of them are non-violent, and every single one of them has some kind of logic, whether or not it makes sense to you and me. Nobody slaughters a family because, hey, I just felt mental today.”
“You asked for a theory that covers what we’ve got. That’s the best I can come up with.”
“A theory that’s built on ‘because he’s mental’ isn’t a theory. It’s a cheap cop-out. And it’s lazy thinking. I expect better from you, Detective.”
I turned my shoulder to him and went back to the drawers, but I could feel him behind me, not moving. I said, “Spit it out.”
“What I told your woman Gogan. That she didn’t need to worry about some psycho. I just wanted to stop her ringing around the talk shows, but fact is, she’s got a right to be scared. I don’t know what word you want me to use, but if this fella’s mental, then nobody has to go asking for trouble. He’s bringing it with him.”
I slid the drawer shut, leaned back against the chest and stuck my hands in my pockets. “There was a philosopher,” I said, “a few hundred years back, who said you should always go for the simplest solution. And he wasn’t talking about the easy answer. He meant the solution that involves throwing in the fewest extras on top of what you’ve actually got on hand. The fewest ifs and maybes, the fewest unknown guys who might possibly have just happened to wander up in the middle of the action. Do you see where I’m going with this?”
Richie said, “You don’t think there was any intruder.”
“Wrong. I think that what we’ve got on hand is Patrick and Jennifer Spain, and any solution that involves them needs fewer extras than a solution that doesn’t. What happened here came from one of two places: inside this house, or outside. I’m not saying there was no intruder. I’m saying that even if the killer came from outside, the simplest solution is that the reason came from inside.”
“Hang on,” Richie said. “You said: still room for an outsider. And that thing with the attic hatch: you said maybe to catch the guy who made the holes. What . . . ?”
I sighed. “Richie. When I said outsider, I was talking about the guy who lent Patrick Spain gambling money. The guy Jenny was shagging on the side. Fiona Rafferty. I wasn’t talking about Freddy bloody Krueger. Do you see the difference?”
“Yeah,” Richie said. His voice was even, but the set of his jaw said he was starting to get annoyed. “I do.”
“I know this case looks—what’s the word you used?—creepy. I know it’s the kind of thing that gets the imagination working overtime. That’s all the more reason to keep your feet on the ground. The most likely solution here is still what it was when we were driving up: your bog-standard murder-suicide.”
“That,” Richie said, pointing at the hole above the bed, “that isn’t bog-standard. Just for starters.”
“How do you know? Maybe all the free time was getting on Patrick Spain’s nerves and he decided to go in for some kind of home improvement, or maybe there’s something dicky in the electrics, just like you suggested, and he tried to fix it himself instead of paying an electrician—that could explain why the alarm wasn’t on, too. Maybe the Spains had a rat after all, caught it, and left the trap up in case its mates came sniffing around. Maybe those holes get bigger every time a car goes past the house, and they wanted video to play in court when they sue the builders. For all we know, everything odd in this whole case comes down to shoddy building.”
“Is that what you think? Seriously, like?”
I said, “What I think, Richie my friend, is that imagination is a dangerous thing. Rule Number Six, or whatever we’re on now: stick with the nice boring solution that requires the least imagination, and you’ll do fine.”
And I went back to digging through Jenny Spain’s T-shirts. I recognized some of the labels: she had the same tastes as my ex. After a minute Richie shook his head, spun the fifty-cent piece onto the top of the chest and started folding Patrick’s khakis. We left each other alone for a while.
The secret I had been waiting for was at the back of Jenny’s bottom drawer, and it was a lump tucked into the sleeve of a pink cashmere cardigan. When I shook the sleeve, something skittered across the thick carpet: something small and hard, folded tightly in a piece of tissue paper.
“Richie,” I said, but he had already put down a jumper and come to look.
It was a round pin badge, the cheapo metal kind you can buy at street stalls if you get the urge to wear a hash leaf or a band name. The paint on this one was worn patchy, but it had started out pale blue; to one side there was a smiling yellow sun, to the other something white that could have been a hot-air balloon or maybe a kite. In the middle it said, in bubbly yellow letters, I GO TO JOJO’S!
I said, “What do you think of that?”
Richie said, “Looks bog-standard to me,” and gave me a straight look.
“It does to me, too, but its location doesn’t. Just offhand, can you give me a bog-standard reason for that?”
“Maybe one of the kids hid it there. Some kids are into hiding stuff.”
“Maybe.” I turned the badge over in my palm. There were two narrow bands of rust on the pin, where it had spent a long time stuck through the same piece of cloth. “I’d like to know what it is, all the same. ‘JoJo’s’ ring any bells with you?”
He shook his head. “Cocktail bar? Restaurant? Play school?”
“Could be. I’ve never heard of it, but it could be long gone; this doesn’t look new to me. Or it could be in the Maldives, or somewhere they went on holiday. I’m not seeing why Jenny Spain would need to hide anything like that, though. Something expensive, I’d be thinking lover’s gift, but this?”
“If she wakes up . . .”
“We’ll ask her what’s the story. That doesn’t mean she’ll tell us, though.”
I folded the badge back into its tissue paper and found an evidence bag. From the chest of drawers Jenny smiled at me, tucked in the curve of Patrick’s arm. Under the fancy hair and all the layers of makeup, she had been ridiculously young. The simple, shining triumph on her face told me that everything beyond that day had been just a golden blur in her mind: And they lived happily ever after.