I had fucked up. Ten years earlier I would have grabbed for him wildly, thinking I’d lost him, and ended up pushing him further away. Now I know, because I’ve fought hard to learn, how to let other things work with me; how to stay still, stay back, and let the job do its job. I eased back in my chair, examined an imaginary spot on my sleeve and left the silence to stretch while that last conversation dissipated out of the air, absorbed into the graffitied particleboard and the scored linoleum, gone. Our interview rooms have seen men and women pushed over the rims of their own minds, heard the thin dull crack of them breaking, watched while they spilled out things that should never be in the world. These rooms can soak up anything, close around it without leaving a trace behind.
When the air had emptied itself of everything but dust I said, very softly, “But you do give a damn about Jenny Spain.”
A muscle flicked, at the corner of Conor’s mouth.
“I know: you didn’t expect me to understand that. You didn’t think anyone would, did you? But I do, Conor. I understand just how much you cared about all four of them.”
That tic again. “Why?” he asked, the words forcing themselves out against his will. “Why do you think that?”
I rested my elbows on the table and leaned in towards him, my clasped hands next to his, like we were two best mates in the pub having a late-night session of I-love-you-man. “Because,” I said gently, “I understand you. Everything about the Spains, everything about that room you set up, everything you’ve said tonight: all of it tells me what they meant to you. There’s no one in the world who means more, is there?”
His head turned towards me. Those gray eyes were clear as still water, all the night’s tension and turmoil drained away. “No,” he said. “No one.”
“You loved them. Didn’t you?”
A nod.
I said, “Let me tell you the biggest secret I’ve ever learned, Conor. All we really need in life is to make the people we love happy. We can do without anything else; you can live in a cardboard box under a bridge, as long as your woman’s face lights up when you get home to that box in the evening. But if you can’t manage to do that . . .”
Out of the corner of my eye I saw Richie easing backwards, off the table, leaving the two of us in our circle. Conor said, “Pat and Jenny were happy. The happiest people alive.”
“But then that went, and you couldn’t give it back to them. Probably someone or something out there could have made them happy again, but it wasn’t you. I know exactly what it’s like, Conor: loving someone so much that you’d do anything, you’d rip out your own heart and serve it to them with barbecue sauce if that was what it took to make them OK, but it’s not. It wouldn’t do one fucking bit of good. And what do you do when you realize that, Conor? What can you do? What’s left?”
His hands lay spread on the table, palms upturned, empty. He said, so low I barely heard him: “You wait. All you can do.”
“And the longer you wait, the angrier you get. At yourself, at them, at this whole terrible fucked-up mess of a world. Till you can’t think straight any more. Till you barely know what you’re doing.”
His fingers curled inward, fists tightening.
“Conor,” I said: so softly, words falling weightless as feathers through the hot still air. “Jenny’s been through enough hell for a dozen lifetimes. The last thing I want to do is put her through any more. But if you don’t tell me what happened, then I have to go over to that hospital and make her tell me instead. I’ll have to force her to relive every moment of the other night. Do you think she’s strong enough to take that?”
His head swayed, side to side.
“Neither do I. For all I know, it’ll push her mind so far over the edge that she’ll never find her way back, but I don’t have a choice. You do, Conor. You can save her from that, at least. If you love her, now’s your time to show it. Now’s your time to get it right. You’ll never have another chance.”
Conor vanished, somewhere behind that face as angular and immobile as a mask. His mind was going like a race car again, but he had it under control now, working efficiently and at furious speed. I didn’t breathe. Richie, pressed back against the wall, was still as stone.
Then Conor took a quick breath, ran his hands over his cheeks and turned to look at me. “I broke into their house,” he said, clearly, matter-
of-factly, as if he was telling me where he had parked a car. “I killed them. Or thought I had, anyway. Is that what you were after?”
I heard Richie let his breath out, with a tiny unconscious whimper. The hum in my skull rose, screamed like a whirl of diving wasps, and died.
I waited for the rest, but Conor was waiting too: just watching me, with those swollen red-edged eyes, and waiting. Most confessions begin with It wasn’t like you think and go on forever. Killers fill up the room with words, trying to coat over the razor edges of the truth; they prove to you over and over that it just happened or that he asked for it, that in their place anyone would have done the same. Most of them will keep proving it till your ears bleed, if you let them. Conor was proving nothing. He was done.
I said, “Why?”
He shook his head. “Doesn’t matter.”
“It’s going to matter to the victims’ family. It’s going to matter to the sentencing judge.”
“Not my problem.”
“I’ll need a motive to go in your statement.”
“Make one up. I’ll sign whatever you want.”
Mostly they loosen, after the river’s been crossed. Everything they had went into clinging to their safe bank of lies. Now the current’s ripped them away, buffeted them dizzy and gasping, smashed them down with a tooth-cracking jolt on the far bank, and they think the hard part is over and done with. It leaves them unraveled and boneless; some of them shake uncontrollably, some of them cry, a few can’t stop talking or can’t stop laughing. They haven’t noticed yet that the landscape is different here; that things are transforming around them, familiar faces dissolving, landmarks vanishing into the distance, that nothing will ever be the same again. Conor was different. He was still gathered like a waiting animal, made of concentration. In some way that I couldn’t spot, the battle wasn’t over.
If I got into it with him over the motive, he would win, and you don’t let them win. I said, “How did you get into the house?”
“Key.”
“To which door?”
A splinter of a pause. “Back.”
“Where’d you get that?”
That splinter again, bigger this time. He was being careful. “Found it.”
“When?”
“A while back. Few months, maybe more.”
“Where?”
“Street outside. Pat dropped it.”
I could feel it on my skin, the sideslipping twist to his voice that said Lie, but I couldn’t put my finger on where or why. Richie said, from the corner behind Conor’s shoulder, “You couldn’t see the street from your hide. How’d you know he’d dropped the key?”
Conor thought that over. “Saw him come in from work in the evening. Later that night, I went for a wander around, spotted the key, figured he had to be the one that lost it.”