The anger shot through me like a muscle spasm. “Richie,” I said, very carefully keeping my voice under control. “Let’s review for a second, shall we? We’ve got the sniper’s nest that Conor Brennan set up to stalk the Spains. We’ve got his own admission that he broke into their house multiple times. And now, Richie, now we’ve got a fucking confession. Go ahead and tell me, old son: what the fuck else do you want? What the fuck would it take to make you sure?”
Richie was shaking his head. “We’ve got plenty. I’m not arguing there. But even back when we had nothing, only that hide, you were positive.”
“So what? I was right. Did you miss that part? You’re getting your knickers in a knot because I got there ahead of you?”
“Makes me nervous, being too sure too early. It’s dangerous.”
The jolt hit me again, hard enough to clench my jaw. “You’d rather keep an open mind. Is that it?”
“Yeah. I would.”
“Right. Good idea. For how long? Months? Years? Till God sends choirs of angels to sing you the guy’s name in four-part harmony? Do you want us to be standing here in ten years’ time, telling each other, ‘Well, it could be Conor Brennan, but then again, it could be the Russian Mafia, we might want to explore that possibility a little more thoroughly before we make any rash decisions’?”
“No. I’m only saying—”
“You have to get sure, Richie. You have to. There is no other option. Sooner or later, you shit or you get off the pot.”
“I know that. I’m not talking about any ten years.”
The heat was the kind you get in a cell in a bad August: thick, motionless, clogging your lungs like wet cement. “Then what the hell are you talking about? What’ll it take? In a few hours’ time, when we get our hands on Conor Brennan’s car, Larry and his boys are going to find the Spains’ blood all over it. Around the same time, they’re going to match his fingerprints to the prints they found all over that hide. And a few hours after that, assuming that please God we get hold of the runners and the gloves, they’re going to prove that that bloody shoeprint and those bloody handprints were made by Conor Brennan. I’d bet a month’s salary on it. Will that make you sure?”
Richie rubbed at the back of his neck and grimaced. I said, “Oh, for Christ’s sake. Right. Let’s hear it. I guaran-damn-tee you, by the end of today, we’ll have physical proof he was in that house when that family got killed. How are you planning to explain that away?”
Conor was writing, head bent low over the statement sheet, arm curved protectively around it. Richie watched him. He said, “This guy loved the Spains. Like you said. Say, let’s just say, he’s up in his hide the other night—maybe Jenny’s on the computer, he’s watching her. Then Pat comes downstairs and goes for her. Conor freaks out, goes to break up the fight: legs it down from his hide and over the wall, lets himself in through their back door. But by then it’s too late. Pat’s dead or dying, Conor thinks Jenny is too—probably he doesn’t check too carefully, not with all the blood and the panic. Maybe he’s the one that brought her over to Pat, so they could be together.”
“Touching. How do you explain the wiped computer? The missing weapons? What’s all that about?”
“Same again: he cares about the Spains. He doesn’t want Pat taking the rap. He wipes the computer ’cause he thinks maybe whatever Jenny was doing on there could be what triggered Pat—or he knows for definite that it was. Then he takes the weapons and dumps them, so it’ll look like an intruder.”
I took a second and a breath, to make sure I wouldn’t bite his head off. “Well, it’s a pretty little fairy story, old son. Poignant, is that the word I’m looking for? And that’s all it is. It’s fine as far as it goes, but you’re skipping right past this: why the holy hell did Conor confess?”
“Because. What happened in there.” Richie nodded at the glass. “Man, you practically told him you were going to put Jenny Spain in a straitjacket if he didn’t give you what you were after.”
I said, and my voice was cold enough to warn a much stupider man than Richie, “Do you have a problem with the way I’m doing my job, Detective?”
His hands went up. “I’m not picking holes. I’m only saying: that’s why he confessed.”
“No, Detective. No, it bloody well isn’t. He confessed because he did it. All that crap I gave him about loving Jenny, all that did was pick the lock; it didn’t put anything behind the door that wasn’t already fucking there. Maybe your experience has been different from mine, maybe you’re just better at this job, but I have a hard enough time getting my suspects to confess to what they did. I can safely say I’ve never, in all my career, managed to get one of them to confess to something he didn’t do. If Conor Brennan says he’s our man, then it’s because he is.”
“He’s not like most of them, though, is he? You said it yourself, we’ve both been saying: he’s different. There’s something weird going on there.”
“He’s weird, yeah. He’s not Jesus. He’s not here to give his life for Pat Spain’s sins.”
Richie said, “It’s not just him that’s weird. What about the baby monitors? Those weren’t your man Conor’s doing. And the holes in the walls? There was something going on inside that house.”
I leaned back against the wall with a thump and folded my arms. It might have been just the fatigue, or the thin yellowy-gray dawn smearing the window, but that champagne fizz of victory was well and truly gone. “Tell me, old son: why the hate for Pat Spain? Is this some kind of chip on your shoulder, because he was a good solid pillar of the community? Because if it is, I’m warning you now: get rid of it, sharpish. You’re not always going to be able to find a nice middle-class boy to pin things on.”
Richie came at me fast, finger pointing; for a second I thought he was going to jab me in the chest, but he had enough sense left to stop himself. “It’s got nothing to do with class. Nothing. I’m a cop, man. Same as yourself. I’m not some thicko skanger you brought in as a favor because it’s Take A Knacker To Work Day.”
He was too close and much too angry. I said, “Then act like a cop. Step back, Detective. Get a grip on yourself.”
Richie stared me out of it for another second; then he wheeled away, flung himself back against the glass and shoved his hands deep into his pockets. “You tell me, man: why are you so dead set that it isn’t Patrick Spain? Why the love?”
I had no obligation to explain myself to some jumped-up little newbie, but I wanted to; I wanted to say it, shove it deep into Richie’s head. “Because,” I said, “Pat Spain followed the rules. He did everything people are supposed to do. That’s not how killers live. I told you from the start: things like this don’t come out of nowhere. All that crap the families give the media—‘Oh, I can’t believe he would do this, he’s such a Boy Scout, never done anything bad in his life, they were the happiest couple in the world’—that’s garbage. Every time, Richie, every single time, it turns out that the guy was a Boy Scout except for a record as long as your arm, or he’d never done anything bad except for his little habit of terrorizing the shit out of his wife, or they were the happiest couple in the world except for the minor fact that he was banging her sister. There’s not one hint, anywhere, that any of that applied to Pat. You’re the one who said it: the Spains did their best. Pat was a trier. He was one of the good guys.”
Richie didn’t move. “Good guys break.”
“Seldom. Very, very seldom. And there’s a reason for that. It’s because the good guys have stuff to hold them in place, when the going gets tough. They’ve got jobs, families, responsibilities. They’ve got the rules they’ve been following their whole lives. I’m sure all that stuff sounds uncool to you, but here’s the fact: it works. Every day, it keeps people from crossing over the line.”
“So,” Richie said flatly, “because Pat was a nice middle-class boy. A pillar of the community. That’s why he couldn’t be a killer.”
I didn’t want to have this argument, not in an airless observation room at some ungodly hour of the morning with sweat sticking my shirt to my back. I said, “Because he had things to love. He had a home—OK, it was in the arsehole of nowhere, but one look at it should have told you that Pat and Jenny loved every inch of the place. He had the woman he’d been loving ever since they were sixteen; still mad about each other, that’s what Brennan said. He had two kids who climbed all over him. That’s what holds the good guys together, Richie. They’ve got places to put their hearts into. They’ve got people to take care of. People to love. That’s what stops them from going over the edge, when a guy who wasn’t weighted down would be in free fall. And you’re trying to convince me that Pat just turned around one day and blew all that away, for no reason at all.”
“Not for no reason. You said yourself: he could’ve been about to lose the lot. The job was gone, the gaff was going; the wife and kids could’ve been about to go as well. It happens. All over this country, it’s been happening. The triers are the ones that snap, when trying doesn’t do any good.”
All of a sudden I was exhausted, two sleepless nights digging their claws in and dragging me down with all their weight. I said, “The one who snapped was Conor Brennan. Now there’s a man who’s got nothing left to lose: no work, no home, no family, not even his own mind. I’ll bet you any amount of money you want, when we start looking into his life we’re not going to find a close-knit circle of friends and loved ones. Nothing’s holding Brennan in place. He’s got nothing to love; nothing except the Spains. He’s spent the last year living like some kind of cross between a hermit and the Unabomber, all so he could stalk them. Even your own little theory hinges on the fact that Conor was a delusional freak show who was spying on them at three in the bloody morning. The guy’s not right, Richie. He’s not OK. There’s no way around that.”
Behind Richie, in the harsh white light of the interview room, Conor had put down the pen and was pressing his fingertips into his eyes, rubbing them in a grim, relentless rhythm. I wondered how long it had been since he had slept. “Remember what we talked about? The simplest solution? It’s sitting behind you. If you find evidence that Pat was a vicious sonofabitch who was beating the shit out of his family while he got ready to leave them for a Ukrainian lingerie model, then come back to me. Until then, I’m putting my money on the psycho stalker.”
Richie said, “You told me yourself: ‘psycho’ isn’t a motive. All that about being upset because the Spains weren’t happy, that’s nothing. They’d been in trouble for months. You’re telling me the other night he just decided out of the blue, so fast he didn’t even have time to clean out his hide: There’s nothing on the telly, I know what I’ll do, I’ll head on down to the Spains’ and kill the lot of them? Come on, man. Here’s you saying Pat Spain didn’t have a motive. What the hell was this fella’s motive? Why the hell would he want any of them dead?”
One of the many ways that murder is the unique crime: it’s the only one that makes us ask why. Robbery, rape, fraud, drug dealing, all the filthy litany, they come with their filthy explanations built in; all you have to do is slot the perp into the perp-shaped hole. Murder needs an answer.
Some detectives don’t care. Officially, they’re right: if you can prove whodunit, nothing in the law says you need to prove why. I care. When I pulled what looked like a random drive-by, I spent weeks—after we had the shooter in custody, after we had enough evidence to sink him ten times over—having in-depth conversations with every monosyllabic cop-hating lowlife in his shit-hole neighborhood, until someone let slip that the victim’s uncle worked in a shop and had refused to sell the shooter’s twelve-year-old sister a packet of cigarettes. The day we stop asking why, the day we decide that it’s acceptable for the answer to a severed life to be Just because, is the day we step away from that line across the cave entrance and invite the wild to come howling in.
I said, “Trust me: I’m going to find out. We’ve got Brennan’s associates to talk to, we’ve got his flat to search, we’ve got the Spains’ computer—and Brennan’s, if he’s got one—to go through, we’ve got forensic evidence waiting to be analyzed . . . Somewhere in there, Detective, there’s a motive. Forgive me if I don’t have every piece of the puzzle in place within forty-eight hours of getting the bloody case, but I promise you, I will find them. Now let’s get this fucking statement and go home.”
I headed for the door, but Richie stayed put. He said, “Partners. That’s what you said this morning, remember? We’re partners.”
“Yes. We are. So?”
“So you don’t make the decisions for the both of us. We make them together. And I say we keep looking at Pat Spain.”
The stance—feet planted apart, shoulders squared—told me he wasn’t going to budge without a fight. We both knew that I could shove him back in his box and slam the lid on his head. One bad report from me and Richie was off the squad, back to Motor Vehicles or Vice for another few years, probably forever. All I had to do was touch on that, one delicate hint, and he would back off: finish Conor’s paperwork, leave Pat Spain to rest in peace. And that would be the end of that tentative thing that had begun in the hospital car park, less than twenty-four hours earlier.
I closed the door again. “All right,” I said. I let myself slump back against the wall and tried to squeeze tension out of my shoulder. “All right. Here’s what I suggest. We’ll need to spend the next week or so investigating Conor Brennan, to waterproof our case—that’s assuming he’s our man. I suggest that, during that time, you and I also conduct a parallel investigation into Pat Spain. Superintendent O’Kelly would like that idea even less than I do—he’d call it a waste of time and manpower—so we won’t make a song and dance about it. If and when it does come up, we’re just making sure Brennan’s defense isn’t going to find anything on Pat that they can use as a red herring in court. It’ll mean a lot of very long shifts, but I can handle that if you can.”
Richie already looked ready to fall asleep standing up, but he was young enough that a few hours would fix that. “I can handle it.”
“I thought so. If we turn up anything solid on Pat, then we’ll regroup and review. How does that strike you?”
He nodded. “Good,” he said. “Sounds good.”
I said, “The word for this week is discreet. Until and unless we come up with solid evidence, I’m not going to spit on Pat Spain’s body by calling him a murderer to the people who loved him, and I’m not going to watch you do it either. If you let any of them twig that he’s being treated as a suspect, we’re done. Do I make myself clear?”
“Yeah. Crystal.”
In the interview room, the pen was still down on the scribbled statement sheet and Conor was sagging over them, the heels of his hands pressed into his eyes. I said, “We all need sleep. We’ll hand him over for processing, get the report typed up, leave instructions for the floaters, and then we’ll go home and crash for a few hours. We’ll meet back here at noon. Now let’s go see what he’s got for us.”
I scooped my jumpers off the chair and bent to stuff them back into the holdall, but Richie stopped me. “Thanks,” he said.
He was holding out his hand and looking me straight in the face, steady green eyes. When we shook, the strength in his grip took me by surprise.
“No thanks needed,” I said. “It’s what partners do.”
The word hung in the air between us, bright and fluttering as a lit match. Richie nodded. “Sound,” he said.
I gave him a quick clap on the shoulder and went back to packing up. “Come on. I don’t know about you, but I’m dying for some kip.”
We threw our stuff into our holdalls, binned the litter of paper cups and coffee stirrers, switched off the lights and closed the observation-room door. Conor hadn’t moved. At the end of the corridor the window was still bleary with that tired city dawn, but this time the chill didn’t touch me. Maybe it was all that youthful energy beside me: the victory fizz was back in my veins and I felt wide awake again, straight-backed and strong and rock-solid, ready for whatever came next.