*
By twenty to six, we were working our way through the playroom area and the light outside the kitchen windows was starting to cool towards evening. I said to Richie, “Can you finish up here?”
He glanced up, didn’t ask. “No probs.”
“I’ll be back in fifteen minutes. Be ready to head back to HQ.” I stood up—my knees jolted and cracked, I was getting too old for this—and left him crouching there, rummaging through picture books and plastic tubs of crayons, surrounded by the blood spatter that Larry and his team had no more use for. As I left my foot knocked over some kind of blue fluffy animal, which let out a high-pitched giggle and started to sing. Its thin, sweet, inhuman chant followed me down the hall and out the door.
As the day started to ebb, the estate was coming to life. The media had packed up and gone home, taking their helicopter with them, but in the house where we had talked to Fiona Rafferty a clutch of little boys were ricocheting about, swinging off the scaffolding and pretending to shove each other out of high windows, dancing black silhouettes against the burning sky. At the end of the road a huddle of teenagers were slouching on the wall around a weed-grown garden, not even pretending not to be smoking or drinking or staring at me. Somewhere someone was roaring furious circles on a big bike with no muffler; farther away, rap was pumping relentlessly. Birds dived in and out of empty window-holes, and by the roadside something scuttled in a heap of bricks and barbed wire, setting off a tiny avalanche of dust.
The back entrance of the estate was two great stone gateposts, opening onto a sweep of swaying long grass that had grown up thick in the gap where the gate should have been. The grass whispered soothingly and clamped tight around my ankles, tugging me back, as I moved down the gentle slope towards the sand dunes.
The search team was at the tide line, picking through seaweed and the bubbling holes where winkles were buried. They straightened up, one by one, when they saw me coming. I said, “Any luck?”
They showed me their haul of evidence bags, like cold children straggling home with their finds at the end of a long day on some grotesque scavenger hunt. Cigarette butts, cider cans, used condoms, broken earphones, ripped T-shirts, food packets, old shoes: every empty house had had something to offer, every empty house had been claimed and colonized by someone—kids looking for places to dare each other, couples looking for privacy or for thrills, teenagers looking for something to wreck, creatures looking for somewhere to breed and grow, mice, rats, birds, weeds, tiny busy insects. Nature doesn’t let anything go empty, doesn’t let anything go to waste. The second the builders and developers and estate agents had moved out, other things had started moving in.
There were a few finds worth having: two blades—a broken penknife, probably too small to be ours, and a switchblade that could have been interesting except that it was half rusted away—three door keys that would need checking against the Spains’ locks, a scarf with a stiff dark patch that might turn out to be blood. “Good stuff,” I said. “Hand it all over to Boyle from the Bureau, and go home. At eight A.M. sharp, pick up where you left off. I’ll be at the post-mortems, but I’ll join you as soon as I can. Thank you, ladies and gentlemen. Nice work.”
They trudged up through the dunes towards the estate, pulling off gloves and rubbing at stiff necks. I stayed where I was. The team would assume I was taking a still moment to think about the case, working through the dark maths of the probabilities or letting small dead faces have their time to fill my mind. If our man was watching me, he would figure the same thing. I wasn’t. I had budgeted these ten minutes into the day’s schedule, to test myself against that beach.
I kept my back to the estate, all that strafed hope where there used to be bright swimming costumes fluttering on makeshift washing lines between caravans. There was an early moon, pale against the pale sky, flickering behind slim smoky clouds; below it the sea was gray and restless, insistent. Seabirds were reclaiming the tide line, now that the searchers were gone; I stood still, and after a few minutes they forgot me and went back to their skittering search for food and to their calls, high and clean as wind in fretted rock. Once, when a night bird’s squeal close outside the caravan window startled Dina awake, my mother quoted Shakespeare for her: Be not afraid; the isle is full of noises: sounds and sweet airs that give delight and hurt not.
The wind had grown a cold edge; I turned up my coat collar and dug my hands into my pockets. The last time I set foot on that beach, I had been fifteen: just starting to shave like I meant it, just getting used to my brand-new shoulders, just a week into going out with someone for the first time, a golden girl from Newry called Amelia who laughed at all my jokes and tasted like strawberries. I was different, back then: electric and reckless, body-slamming headlong onto any chance of a laugh or a dare, made out of enough momentum to shoot me straight through stone walls. When we guys arm-wrestled to impress the girls, I took on big Dean Gorry and beat him three times running, even though he was twice my size, because that was how badly I wanted to make Amelia clap for me.
I looked out over the water, into the night that was coming in on the tide, and I felt nothing at all. The beach looked like something I had seen in an old film, once upon a time; that hotheaded boy felt like a character from some book I had read and given away in childhood. Only, somewhere far inside my spine and deep in the palms of my hands, something hummed; like a sound too low to hear, like a warning, like a cello string when a tuning fork strikes the perfect tone to call it awake.