*
I dropped Dina off at Geri’s and made excuses to avoid going in—Geri wanted me to stay for dinner, on the grounds that “you won’t catch it, sure Colm and Andrea haven’t, I thought Colm’s bowels were at him earlier on but he says he’s grand—Pookie, down!—I don’t know what he was doing in the toilet all that time, but that’s his business . . .” Dina threw me a silent-scream face over her shoulder and mouthed You owe me as Geri shepherded her into the house, still talking, with the dog bouncing and yapping around them.
I went home again, threw a few things into a holdall and grabbed a fast shower and an hour’s sleep. I got dressed like a kid on a first date, all thumbs and heartbeat, dressing just for him: shirt and tie in case I got a chance to interview him, two thick jumpers so I could wait for him through the cold, heavy dark coat to shield me from him till the right moment came. I imagined him, somewhere, dressing for me and thinking about Broken Harbor. I wondered if he still thought he was the stalker, or if he understood that he had turned to prey.
Richie was outside the back gate of Dublin Castle at a quarter to seven, carrying a sports bag and wearing a padded jacket, a woolly hat and, going by his shape, every fleece he owned. I rode the speed limit all the way to Broken Harbor, as the fields dimmed around us and the air turned sweet with turf smoke and plowed earth. It was getting dark when we parked in Ocean View Parade—across the estate from the Spains’, nothing but scaffolding, no one to spot an unfamiliar car—and started walking.
I had memorized the route from a map of the estate, but I still felt like we were lost the moment we stepped away from the car. Dusk was closing in: the day’s clouds had blown away and the sky was a deep blue-green, with a faint white glow over the rooftops where the moon was rising, but the streets were dark, chunks of garden wall and unlit street lamps and sagging chicken wire looming out of nowhere and gone a few steps later. When our shadows showed faintly they were twisted and unfamiliar, turned hunchbacked by the holdalls slung over our shoulders. Our footsteps came back to us like followers’, bouncing off bare walls and across stretches of churned mud. We didn’t talk: the dusk that was helping to cover us could be covering someone else, anywhere.
In the near-darkness the sound of the sea was bigger, stronger, disorienting, rising up at us from every direction at once. The patrol floaters’ old dark-blue Peugeot materialized behind us like a ghost car, so close that we both jumped, its engine noise hidden in that long dull roar. By the time we realized who it was, they were gone, slipping away between houses that showed stars through their window-holes.
Down Ocean View Rise, rectangles of light fell across the road. One of them lit up a yellow Fiat parked outside the Spains’ house: our fake Fiona was in place. At the top of Ocean View Walk, I moved Richie into the shadow of the corner house, put my mouth close to his ear and whispered, “Goggles.”
He squatted over his holdall and pulled out a pair of thermal-imaging goggles. Supplies had given him the good ones, newbie or no. The stars vanished and the dark street leaped into ghostly half life, creepers hanging pale on tall blocks of gray wall, wild plants crisscrossing white and lacy where the pavements should have been. In a couple of the gardens, small glowing shapes crouched in corners or scurried through the weeds, and three phantom wood doves slept high in a tree, heads tucked under their wings; no warm thing bigger than that, anywhere in sight. The street was silent, just sea-sounds and wind fingering through the creepers and a lone bird crying out on the beach, over the wall. “Looks clear,” I said, into Richie’s ear. “Let’s go. Carefully.”
The goggles said nothing was alive in our man’s lair, at least not in the corners I could see. The scaffolding was rough with rust, and I felt it shake under our weight. Upstairs, the moon blazed in through a window-hole where the plastic was pinned back like a curtain. The room had been stripped bare; the Bureau had taken everything, to test for prints, fibers, hairs, body fluids. There were black swipes of print dust on the walls and the windowsills.
Every light in the Spains’ house was on, turning the place into a great beacon signaling to our man. Our fake Fiona was in the kitchen, still wrapped in her red duffle coat; she had filled the Spains’ kettle and was leaning against the counter waiting for it to boil, cupping her mug in both hands and staring blankly at the finger paintings stuck to the fridge. In the garden, moonlight caught on glossy leaves, turned them white and shivering so that it looked like all the trees and hedges had burst into flower at once.
We set up our stuff where our man had set up his: against the back wall of the hide, for clear views of both the Spains’ kitchen—just in case—and the front window-hole, looking out over the beach, that he had used as a door. The plastic sheeting over the other holes would screen us from a watcher hidden in the jungle all around. The night was coming down cold, there would be frost before dawn; I spread out my sleeping bag to sit on, added another jumper under my coat. Richie knelt on the floor pulling stuff out of his holdall like a kid on a camping trip: a thermos, a packet of chocolate Hobnobs, a slightly squashed tower of sandwiches wrapped in tinfoil. “Starving,” he said. “Sandwich, yeah? I brought enough for the two of us, in case you didn’t get a chance.”
I was about to say no automatically when I realized that he was right, I hadn’t remembered to bring food—Dina—and that I was starving too. “Thanks,” I said. “I’d love one.”
Richie nodded and pushed the sandwich tower towards me. “Cheese and tomato, turkey, or ham. Take a few.”
I took cheese and tomato. Richie poured strong tea into the thermos cap and tilted it at me; when I held up my water bottle, he downed the tea in one and poured himself another capful. Then he made himself comfortable with his back against the wall and got stuck into his sandwich.
He didn’t look like he was under the impression that tonight would involve deep and meaningful conversation, which was good. I know other detectives get into heart-to-hearts on stakeouts. I don’t. One or two newbies had tried, either because they genuinely liked me or because they wanted to nuzzle up to the boss, I didn’t bother to find out which before I nipped that in the bud. “These are good,” I said, taking another sandwich. “Thanks.”
Before it got dark enough for action stations, I checked in with the floaters. Our fake Fiona’s voice was steady, maybe too steady, but she said she was fine, thanks, no backup needed. Marlboro Man and his friend said we were the most exciting thing they’d seen all evening.
Richie was working his way methodically through the sandwiches, gazing out past the last row of houses to the dark beach. The comforting fragrance of his tea made the room feel warmer. After a while he said, “I wonder did it actually use to be a harbor.”
“It did,” I said. He would take it for granted that I had been researching, Mr. Boring using his scraps of free time to comb the internet. “This was a fishing village, a long time back. You might still be able to see what’s left of the pier, down at the south end of the beach, if you go looking.”
“Is that why Broken Harbor, yeah? The broken-down pier?”
“No. It’s from breacadh: daybreak. I suppose because it would have been a good place to watch the dawn.”
Richie nodded. He said, “I’d say it was lovely out here, back before all this.”
“It probably was,” I said. The smell of the sea swept over the wall and in through the empty window-hole, wide and wild with a million intoxicating secrets. I don’t trust that smell. It hooks us somewhere deeper than reason or civilization, in the fragments of our cells that rocked in oceans before we had minds, and it pulls till we follow mindlessly as rutting animals. When I was a teenager, that smell used to set me boiling, spark my muscles like electricity, bounce me off the walls of the caravan till my parents sprang me free to obey the call, bounding after whatever tantalizing once-in-a-lifetimes it promised. Now I know better. That smell is bad medicine. It lures us to leap off high cliffs, fling ourselves on towering waves, leave behind everyone we love and face into thousands of miles of open water for the sake of what might be on the far shore. It had been in our man’s nose, two nights before, when he climbed down the scaffolding and went over the Spains’ wall.
Richie said, “They’ll say it’s haunted now. Kids.”
“Probably.”
“Be daring each other to run up and touch the door of the house. Go inside.”
Below us, the lampshades Jenny had bought for her cozy family kitchen were bright with yellow butterflies. One of them was missing, gone to Larry’s lab. “You’re talking like it’s going to be abandoned for good,” I said. “Dial down the negativity there, old son. Jenny’ll need to sell up, once she’s able. Wish her luck. She could do with it.”
Richie said bluntly, “A few more months and the whole estate’ll be abandoned. It’s dead in the water. No one’s gonna buy out here, and even if they were, there’s hundreds of houses to choose from. Are you telling me you’d pick that one?” He jerked his chin towards the window.