“I don’t believe in ghosts,” I said. “And neither do you, not while you’re on the job, anyway.” I didn’t tell him: the ghosts I believe in weren’t trapped in the Spains’ bloodstains. They thronged the whole estate, whirling like great moths in and out of the empty doorways and over the expanses of cracked earth, battering against the sparse lighted windows, mouths stretched wide in silent howls: all the people who should have lived here. The young men who had dreamed of carrying their wives over these thresholds, the babies who should have been brought home from the hospital to soft nurseries in these rooms, the teenagers who should have had their first kisses leaning against lampposts that would never be lit. Over time, the ghosts of things that happened start to turn distant; once they’ve cut you a couple of million times, their edges blunt on your scar tissue, they wear thin. The ones that slice like razors forever are the ghosts of things that never got the chance to happen.
Richie had demolished half the sandwiches and was rolling a piece of tinfoil into a ball between his palms. He said, “Can I ask something?”
He practically raised his hand. It made me feel like I was sprouting gray hair and bifocals all over. I said, hearing the stuffy note in my voice, “You don’t need to ask my permission, Richie. That’s part of my job, answering any questions you’ve got.”
“Right,” Richie said. “Then I was wondering how come we’re here.”
“On this earth?”
He didn’t know whether he was supposed to laugh. “No, I mean . . . Like, here. Doing the stakeout.”
“You’d rather be at home in bed?”
“No! I’m grand where I am; nowhere I’d rather be. I only wondered. Just . . . it doesn’t make any difference who’s here, does it? If our fella shows, he shows; anyone can bring him in. I would’ve expected you to . . . I don’t know. Delegate.”
I said, “It probably won’t make any difference to the arrest, no. But it might make a difference to what comes next. If you’re the one who puts the cuffs on your guy, it gets the relationship off on the right foot: shows him who’s his daddy now, straight from the off. In an ideal world, I’d always be the one who made the collar.”
“You’re not, but. Not every time.”
“I’m not magic, my friend. I can’t be everywhere. Sometimes I have to give someone else a chance.”
Richie said, “Not this time, but. No one else’s getting a look-in on this one till we both get tired enough that we fall over. Amn’t I right?”
The grin in his voice felt good, the solid taking it for granted that we were in this together. “Right,” I said. “And I’ve got enough caffeine tabs to last us a while.”
“Is it because it’s kids?”
The grin had faded. “No,” I said. “If it were just the kids, then it’d be no big deal to let some floater take our guy down. But I want to be the one who gets the man who killed Pat Spain.”
Richie waited, watching me. When I left it there, he said, “How come?”
Maybe it was my cracking knees and the stiffness in my neck as I had pulled myself up the scaffolding, the dragging sense that I was moving towards old and tired; maybe that was what made me all of a sudden want to know what the other lads talk about, into the long tedious nights, that brings them into the squad room the next day walking in step, making shared decisions with just a tilt of the head or a lift of an eyebrow. Maybe it was those moments, over the past couple of days, when I had caught myself feeling like I wasn’t just showing a rookie the ropes; when it had felt like Richie and I were working together, side by side. Maybe it was that treacherous sea smell, eroding all my why-nots to shifting sand. Maybe it was just fatigue. “Tell me this,” I said. “What do you think would have happened if our guy had been just a little better at what he did? Cleaned up this place before he went hunting, got rid of his footprints, left the weapons on the scene?”
“We’d have stuck with Pat Spain.”
In the darkness I could barely see him, just the angle of his head against the window, the tilt of his chin towards me. “Yeah. Probably we would have. And even if we’d had a hunch that someone else was involved . . . What do you think other people would have thought, if we couldn’t put out a description, couldn’t come up with one piece of evidence that he even existed? That Gogan woman, the whole of Brianstown, the man on the street watching this case on the news. Pat and Jenny’s families. What would they have assumed?”
Richie said, “Pat.”
“Exactly like we did.”
“And the real guy would’ve still been out there. Maybe getting ready to do it again.”
“Maybe, yeah. But that’s not my point. Even if he went home last night and found a nice place to hang himself, this guy would have made Pat Spain into a murderer. In the eyes of everyone who’ll ever hear his name, Pat would have been a man who killed the woman who lay down with him. The children they made together.” Even saying the words set that high hum moving in my skull: evil.
Richie said, almost gently, “He’s dead. It couldn’t hurt him.”
“Yeah, he’s dead. Twenty-nine years of life are all he’ll ever have. He should have had fifty more, sixty, but this guy decided to take them all away. And even that wasn’t enough for him: he wanted to go back in time and take away those pathetic twenty-nine years, too. Take away everything Pat had ever been. Leave him with nothing.” I saw that evil like a low cloud of sticky black dust spreading slowly out from this room to cover the houses, the fields, blotting out the moonlight. “That’s fucked up,” I said. “That’s so fucked up I don’t even have words for it.”
We sat there, not talking, while our Fiona found the dustpan and swept up shards of a plate that had smashed in a corner of the kitchen floor. After a while Richie opened his Hobnobs, offered me one and, when I shook my head, munched his way steadily through half the packet. After a while he said, “Can I ask something?”
“Seriously, Richie, you’re going to have to knock that off. It’s not going to inspire confidence in our man if you put up your hand in the middle of an interrogation and ask me if you’re allowed to talk now.”
This time he did grin. “Something personal, but.”
I don’t answer personal questions, not from trainees, but then the whole conversation was one I don’t have with trainees. It took me by surprise, how good it felt, and how easy: to let go of veteran and rookie and all the boundaries that come with them, slip into being just one of two men talking. “Fire away,” I said. “If you’re over the line, I’ll tell you.”
“What does your da do?”
“He’s retired. He was a traffic warden.”
Richie let out a snort of laughter. I said, “What’s funny there?”
“Nothing. Just . . . I figured something a bit more posh. A teacher at a private school, like; geography, maybe. Now that you say it, though, it makes sense.”
“Should I take that as a compliment?”
Richie didn’t answer. He shoved another Hobnob in his mouth and rubbed crumbs off his fingers, but I could feel him thinking. After a while he said, “What you said at the scene the other day: how you don’t get killed unless you go looking for it. Bad things mostly happen to bad people. That’s a luxury, thinking that. D’you know what I mean?”
I pushed away the nudge of something more painful than irritation. “Can’t say I do, old son. In my experience—and I don’t want to rub this in your face, but I’ve had more of that than you have—what you get out of life is mostly what you planted. Not always, no, but mostly. If you think you’re a success, you will be a success; if you think you deserve nothing but crap, you’ll get nothing but crap. Your inner reality shapes your outer one, every day of your life. Do you follow me?”