Even when they got careful, though, they had kept their wireless broadband. I needed to get Computer Crime to flag that computer every shade of urgent. Patrick and Jenny might have had no one in the flesh, but they had had the whole internet to talk to, and some people tell cyberspace the things they wouldn’t tell their best friends.
In a way, you could probably say they had been broke even before Patrick lost his job. He had made good money, but their credit card had a six-grand limit and it had spent most of the time maxed out—there were a lot of three-figure charges to Brown Thomas, Debenhams, a few websites with vaguely familiar girly names—and then there were the two car loans and the mortgage. But only innocents think broke is made of how much you earn and how much you owe. Ask any economist: broke is made of how you feel. The credit crunch didn’t happen because people woke up any poorer than they’d been the day before; it happened because people woke up scared.
Back in January, when Jenny had spent 270 euros on some website called Shoe 2 You, the Spains had been doing just fine. By July, when she had been too scared to change the locks against an intruder, they had been broke as all hell.
Some people get hit by a tidal wave, dig in their nails and hold on; they stay focused on the positive, keep visualizing the way through till it opens up in front of them. Some lose hold. Broke can lead people to places they would never have imagined. It can nudge a law-abiding citizen onto that blurred crumbling edge where a dozen kinds of crime feel like they’re only an arm’s reach away. It can scour away at a lifetime of mild, peaceful decency until all that’s left is teeth and claws and terror. You could almost catch the stench of fear, dank as rotting seaweed, coming up from the dark space at the back of the closet where the Spains had kept their monsters locked down. I said, “It looks like we might not need to go chasing after sister-history, after all.”
Richie ran a thumb through the bank statements again, came to rest on that pathetic last page. “Jesus,” he said, shaking his head.
“Straight-up guy, wife and kids, good job, got his house and his life just the way he likes them; then out of the blue, hey presto, it’s crumbling around his ears. His job’s gone, his car’s gone, his house is going—for all we know, Jenny could have been planning to leave him now that he wasn’t providing, take the kids with her. That could have been what pushed him over the edge.”
“All in less than a year,” Richie said. He put the bank statements down on the bed next to the HomeTime letters, holding them between his fingertips like they were radioactive. “Yeah. That could do it, all right.”
“We’ve still got plenty of ifs on the table. But if Larry’s lads don’t find any evidence of an outsider, and if the weapon turns up somewhere accessible, and if Jenny Spain doesn’t wake up and give us a very plausible story about how someone other than her husband did this . . . This case could be over a lot sooner than we were expecting.”
That was when my phone rang again.
“And there you go,” I said, fishing it out of my pocket. “How much do you want to bet this is one of the floaters to say we’ve got the weapon, somewhere nice and close?”
It was Marlboro Man, and he was so excited his voice was cracking like a teenager’s. “Sir,” he said. “Sir, you need to see this.”