I had been hoping that wouldn’t occur to her. “I thought you liked the peace and quiet.”
“If it’s public enough that the whole damn country can see it, surely to jumping Jesus it can’t be too confidential for me to watch. Right? Considering that it’s not personal.”
“For God’s sake, Dina. I’ve been in work all day. The last thing I want to do is come home and look at work on TV.”
“Then tell me what the fucking fuck is going on. Or I’m going to turn on the news and you’ll have to hold me down to stop me. Do you want to do that?”
“All right,” I said, hands going up. “OK. I’ll give you the story, if you’ll calm down for me. That means you need to stop biting your arm.”
“It’s my bloody arm. What do you care whose business is it?”
“I can’t concentrate while you’re doing that. And as long as I can’t concentrate, I can’t tell you what’s going on. It’s up to you.”
She shot me a defiant glare, bared small white teeth and bit down once more, hard, but when I didn’t react she wiped her arm on her T-shirt and sat on her hands. “There. Happy?”
I said, “It wasn’t just one body. It was a family of four. They were living out in Broken Harbor—it’s called Brianstown now. Someone broke into their house last night.”
“How’d he kill them?”
“We won’t be sure till the post-mortem. It looks like he used a knife.”
Dina stared at nothing and didn’t move, didn’t even breathe, while she thought that over. “Brianstown,” she said finally, abstractedly. “What a stupid fucking cretin name. Whoever came up with that, someone should push his head underneath a lawn mower and hold it there. Are you positive?”
“About the name?”
“No! Je-sus. About the dead people.”
I rubbed at the hinge of my jaw, trying to work some of the tension out of it. “Yeah. I’m positive.”
The focus had come back into her eyes: they were on me, unblinking. “You’re positive because you’re working on it.”
I didn’t answer.
“You said you didn’t want to look at it on the news because you’d been working on it all day. That’s what you said.”
“Looking at a murder case is work. Any murder case. That’s what I do.”
“Blah blah blah whatever, this murder case is your work. Right?”
“What difference does that make?”
“It makes a difference because if you tell me, I’ll let you change the subject.”
I said, “Yeah. I’m on the case. Me and a bunch of other detectives.”
“Hmm,” Dina said. She threw the towel in the general direction of the bathroom door, slid off the sofa and started moving around the room again, forceful automatic circles. I could almost hear the hum of the thing that lives inside her starting to build, a thin mosquito whine.
I said, “And now we change the subject.”
“Yeah,” Dina said. She picked up a little soapstone elephant that Laura and I brought back from holiday in Kenya one year, squeezed it hard and examined the red dents it left in her palm with interest. “I was thinking, before. While I was waiting for you. I want to change my flat.”
“Good,” I said. “We can go look for something online right now.” Dina’s flat is a shit hole. She could afford a perfectly decent place, I help her with the rent, but she says purpose-built apartment blocks make her want to bang her head off the walls, so she always ends up in some decrepit Georgian house that was converted into bedsits in the sixties, sharing a bathroom with some hairy loser who calls himself a musician and needs regular reminders that she has a cop for a brother.
“No,” Dina said. “Listen, for God’s sake. I want to change it like change it, I hate its guts because it itches. I already tried to move, went to the upstairs girls to ask them to swap, I mean it’s not like it’s going to itch them insides of the corners of their elbows and up their fingernails same as it does me. It’s not bugs, I’m you should take a look at how clean, I think it’s just that shitty carpet pattern. I told them that but those bitches wouldn’t listen, they got all goggle-mouthed, big stupid fish, I wonder if they have pet fish for pets? So since I can’t move out I have to change things, I want to move the rooms. I think we hammered them down before but I don’t remember, Mikey, do you did you?”
Richie rang every hour on the hour, just like he had promised, to tell me that more nothing had happened. Sometimes Dina let me answer on the first ring, chewed on one of her fingers while I talked and waited till I hung up before she kicked it up another gear: Who was that, what did he want, what did you tell him about me? . . . Sometimes I had to listen to it ring out two or three times, while she circled faster and talked louder to cover it, until she exhausted herself and slumped on the sofa or the carpet, and I could pick up. At one o’clock she slapped the phone out of my hand, voice rising towards a scream, when I went to answer: You don’t give a fucking I’m trying to tell you something, trying to talk to you, don’t you ignore me for that whoever, you listen listen listen . . .
Just after three she fell asleep on the sofa in midsentence, curled in a tight ball with her head burrowed between the cushions. She had the hem of my T-shirt wrapped around one fist and she was sucking on the cloth.