Richie’s shoulder jumped; he tried to cover it by scratching like something had bitten him. Larry said, almost gently, “It’s actually a big plus. The messier the fight, the more evidence gets left behind: prints, hairs, fibers . . . Give me a nice bloody scene any day.”
I pointed to the door into the hallway. “What about over there? Did they get anywhere near there?”
Larry shook his head. “Doesn’t look like it. Not a sausage within about four feet of that door: no spatter, no bloody footprints except the uniforms’ and the paramedics’, nothing out of place. All just as God and the decorators intended.”
“Is there a phone in here? A cordless, maybe?”
“Not that we’ve found.”
I said, to Richie, “You see what I’m getting at.”
“Yeah. The landline was out on the hall table.”
“Right. Why didn’t Patrick or Jennifer go for it and hit 999, or at least try to? How did he restrain both of them at once?”
Richie shrugged. His eyes were still moving across the end wall, from blood spray to blood spray. “You heard your woman Gogan,” he said. “We don’t have a great rep around this estate. They could’ve figured there was no point.”
The image pressed up against the inside of my skull: Pat and Jenny Spain throat-deep in terror, believing that we were too far away and too indifferent even to be worth calling, that all the world’s protections had deserted them; that it was just the two of them, with the dark and the sea roaring up on every side, on their own against a man with a knife in one hand and their children’s deaths in the other. Going by the tight movement of Richie’s jaw, he was picturing the same thing. I said, “Another possibility is two separate struggles. Our man does his thing upstairs, and then either Pat or Jenny wakes up and hears him on his way out—Pat would add up better, Jenny would be less likely to go investigating on her own. He goes after the guy, catches him in here, tries to hang onto him. That would explain the weapon of opportunity, and the extent of the struggle: our man’s trying to get a big, strong, furious guy off of him. The fight wakes Jenny, but by the time she gets here, our man’s taken Pat down, leaving him free to deal with her. The whole thing could have gone very fast. It doesn’t take that long to make this kind of mess, not when there’s a blade involved.”
Richie said, “That’d make the kids the main targets.”
“It’s looking that way anyhow. The children’s murders are organized, neat: there was some kind of plan there, and everything went according to that plan. The adults were a bloody, out-of-control mess that could easily have ended very differently. Either he wasn’t planning to cross paths with the adults at all, or he had a plan for them, too, and something went wrong. Either way, he started with the kids. That tells me they were probably his main priority.”
“Or else,” Richie said, “it could be the other way round.” His eyes had slipped away from me again, back to the chaos. “The adults were the main target, or one of them was, and the bloody mess was the plan all along; that’s what he was after. The kids were just something he had to get rid of, so they wouldn’t wake up and get in the way of the good stuff.”
Larry had delicately worked one finger under his hood and was scratching where his hairline should have been. He was getting bored—all the psychological chitchat. “Wherever he started, I’d say he finished up by leaving through the back door, not the front. The hall is clean, so’s the drive, but we found three blood smears on the paving stones in the back garden.” He beckoned us towards the window and pointed: neat strips of yellow tape, one just outside the door, two by the edge of the grass. “The surface is uneven, so we’re not going to be able to tell you what kind of smears—they could be shoe prints, or transfer where someone dropped a bloody object, or they could be droplets that got smudged somehow, like if he was bleeding and then stepped on the blood. One of the kids could have scraped its knee days ago, for all we know at this stage. All we’re saying is, there they are.”
I said, “So he’s got a back door key.”
“That or a teleporter. And we found one other thing in the garden that I thought you might want to know about. What with the trap in the attic and all.”
Larry wiggled his fingers at one of his boys, who picked an evidence bag off a pile and held it out. “If you’re not interested,” he said, “we’ll just bin it. Disgusting object.”
It was a robin, or most of one. Something had taken its head off, a couple of days back. There were pale things curling in the ragged dark hole.
“We’re interested,” I said. “Any way you can work out what killed it?”
“Really and truly not my area, but one of the boys back at the lab does outdoorsy things at weekends. Tracks badgers in his moccasins, or whatever. I’ll see what he says.”
Richie was leaning in for a closer look at the robin: tiny clenched claws, crumbs of earth hanging from the bright breast feathers. It was starting to stink, but he didn’t seem to notice. He said, “Most things, if they killed it they’d eat it. Cats, foxes, anything like that: they’d have had the guts out of it. They don’t kill for the sake of it.”
“I wouldn’t have taken you for the woodsman type,” Larry said, arching an eyebrow.
Richie shrugged. “I’m not. I was posted down the country for a while, in Galway. Picked bits up from listening to the local lads.”
“Go on, then, Crocodile Dundee. What would take the head off a robin and leave the rest?”
“Mink, maybe? Pine marten?”
I said, “Or human.” It wasn’t the trap in the attic I had thought of, the second I saw what was left of that robin. It was Emma and Jack bouncing out into the garden to play, early one morning, and finding this, all among the grass and the dew. From that hide, someone would have had a perfect view. “Those kill for the sake of it, all the time.”