*
Conor’s place was a basement flat, in a tall brick house with the paint peeling off the window frames; his door was at the back, down a flight of narrow steps with rusted railings. Inside, the flat—bedroom, tiny living-room-cum-kitchen, tinier bathroom—looked like he had forgotten it existed a long time ago. It wasn’t filthy, or not quite, but there were cobwebs in the corners, food scraps in the kitchen sink and things ground into the linoleum. The fridge was ready-meals and Sprite. Conor’s clothes were good quality but a couple of years old, clean but half folded in crumpled heaps at the bottom of the wardrobe. His paperwork was in a cardboard box in a corner of the living room—bills, bank statements, receipts, all tossed in together; some of the envelopes hadn’t even been opened. With a little work, I could probably have put my finger on the exact month when he had let go of his life.
No obviously bloody clothes, no clothes in the washing machine, no clothes hanging up to dry; no bloody runners—no runners at all—but the two pairs of shoes in the wardrobe were a size ten. I said, “I’ve never seen a guy his age who doesn’t own a single pair of runners.”
“Ditched them,” Richie said. He had flipped Conor’s mattress up against the wall and was running a gloved hand over the underside. “I’d say that was the first thing he did, when he got home Monday night: got some clean clothes on and dumped the dirty ones as quick as he could.”
“Which means nearby, if we’re lucky. We’ll get a few of the lads to start searching the neighborhood bins.” I was going through the heaps of clothes, checking pockets and feeling seams for damp. It was cold in there: the heating—a plug-in oil heater—was off, and a chill struck straight up through the floor. “Even if we never find the bloody stuff, though, it could still come in useful. If young Conor tries to go for some kind of insanity defense—and let’s face it, that’s basically the only option he’s got left—then we point out that he tried to cover up what he’d done, which means he knew it was wrong, which means he was as sane as you and me. Legally, anyway.”
I put in a call for some lucky searchers to do bin duty—the flat was near enough to underground that I had to go outside to get a signal on my phone; Conor wouldn’t have been able to talk to his friends even if he had had any. Then we moved on to the sitting room.
Even with the lights on, the room was dim. The window, at head-level, looked out on a flat gray wall; I had to crane my neck sideways to catch a narrow rectangle of sky, birds whirling against heavy cloud. The most promising stuff—a monster computer with cornflakes in the keyboard, a battered mobile—was on Conor’s desk, and it was stuff we couldn’t touch without Kieran. Beside the desk was an old wooden fruit crate, with a tattered label of a dark-haired girl holding up an orange and smiling. I flipped the lid off. Inside was Conor’s stash of souvenirs.
A blue checked scarf, faded from washing, with a few long pale hairs still caught in the weave. A half-burnt green candle in a glass jar, filling the box with the sweet, nostalgic scent of ripe apples. A page from a palm-sized notepad, crumples carefully smoothed out: a phone doodle, fast strong strokes, a rugby player running with the ball in his elbow. The mug, a cracked tea-stained thing painted with poppies. The handful of elastic bands, arranged as neatly as treasure. A kid’s crayon drawing, four yellow heads, blue sky, birds overhead and black cat sprawled in a flowering tree. A green plastic magnet shaped like an X, faded and chewed. A dark-blue pen with gold curly writing: Golden Bay Resort—your door to Paradise!
I reached out one finger and pushed the scarf away from the bottom corner of the drawing. EMMA, in those wobbly capitals, and beside it the date. The rust-brown that smeared the sky and the flowers wasn’t paint. She had drawn the picture on Monday, probably in school, with a handful of hours left in her life.
There was a long silence. We knelt on the floor, smelling wood and apples.
“So,” I said. “There’s our proof. He was in the house the night they died.”
Richie said, “I know that.”
Another silence, this one stretched tighter, while we each waited for the other to break it. Upstairs, high heels went clicking sharply across a bare floor. “OK,” I said, and fitted the lid gently onto the crate. “OK. Let’s bag it, tag it and move on.”
The ancient orange sofa was just about visible under jumpers, DVDs, empty plastic bags. We worked our way through the layers, checking for blood and shaking things out and dumping them onto the floor. “For Christ’s sake,” I said, unearthing a TV guide for the beginning of June and a half-full packet of salt and vinegar crisps. “Look at this.”
Richie gave a wry grin and held up a wad of paper towel that had been used to clean up something like coffee. “Seen worse.”
“So have I, but there’s still no excuse. I don’t care if the guy was skint: self-respect is free. The Spains were just as broke as he was, and their gaff was spotless.” Even at my lowest, just after Laura and I split, I never left chunks of food to rot in my sink. “It’s hardly as if he was too busy to pick up a J cloth.”
Richie had got down to the sofa cushions; he pulled one out and ran his hand around the edges of the frame, in among the crumbs. “Twenty-four hours a day in this place, no job to go to, no money to go out: that’d have your head melted. Not sure I’d be arsed cleaning, either.”
“He wasn’t stuck here twenty-four-seven, remember. Conor still had places to go. He was a busy boy, out at Brianstown.”
Richie unzipped the cushion cover and slid a hand inside. “True enough,” he said. “And you know something? That’s why this place is a tip. It wasn’t his home. That hide on the estate, that was his home. And that was as clean as you like.”
We did the search right: undersides of drawers, backs of bookshelves, inside the boxes of out-of-date processed crap in the freezer—we even used Conor’s charger to plug Richie’s phone into every socket in the place, to make sure none of them was a dud hiding a cache spot. The paperwork box was going back to HQ with us, in case Conor had used an ATM two minutes after Jenny or kept a receipt for designing Pat’s company’s website, but we took a quick look just for kicks. His bank statements followed the same general depressing pattern as Pat and Jenny’s: a decent income and solid savings, then a smaller income and shrinking savings, then broke. Since Conor was self-employed, he had tanked less dramatically than Pat Spain—gradually the checks got smaller, the gaps between them got larger—but he had done it earlier. The slide had started in late 2007; by the middle of 2008, he had been dipping into his savings. It had been months since anything went into his account.
By half past two we were finishing up, putting stuff back where it belonged, which in this case meant rearranging it from our focused mess to Conor’s unfocused one. It had looked better our way.
I said, “You know what strikes me about this place?”
Richie was shoving books back onto the bookshelf by the handful, setting little eddies of dust swirling. “Yeah?”
“There’s no trace of anyone else in here. No girlfriend’s toothbrush, no photos of Conor with his mates, no birthday cards, no ‘Ring Dad’ or ‘8pm, meet Joe at the pub’ on the calendar: nothing that says Conor’s ever met another human being in his life.” I slid DVDs onto their rack. “Remember what I said about him having nothing to love?”
“Could be all digital. Loads of people our age, they keep everything on their phones, or on the computer—photos, appointments—” A book went down on the shelf with a flat bang and Richie whirled round to me, his mouth open, his hands going up to clasp the back of his head. “Shit,” he said. “Photos.”
“Is there a rest of that sentence, old son?”
“Shit. I knew I’d seen him. No bleeding wonder he cared about them—”
“Richie.”
Richie rubbed his hands over his cheeks, caught a deep breath and blew it out again. “Remember last night, yeah, you asked Conor which one of the Spains did he hope had made it? And he said Emma? No bleeding wonder, man. He’s her godfather.”
The framed photo on Emma’s bookshelf: a featureless baby in white lace, Fiona all dressed up, a floppy-haired guy at her shoulder. I remembered him boyish, smiling; I couldn’t see his face. I said, “Are you sure?”
“I am, yeah. I’m sure. That picture in her room, remember? He was younger, he’s lost a load of weight since, got his hair cut short, but I swear to God, it’s him.”
The photo had gone to HQ, along with everything else identifying anyone who had known the Spains. “Let’s double-check,” I said. Richie was already pulling out his phone. We almost ran up the steps.
Inside five minutes, the floater on tip-line duty had dug out the picture, taken a photo of it on his phone and e-mailed it to Richie’s. It was small and starting to pixelate, and Conor looked happier and better rested than I could ever have pictured him, but it was him, all right: solid in his grown-up suit, holding Emma like she was made of crystal, with Fiona reaching across him to put a finger into one tiny hand.
“Fucking hell,” Richie said softly, staring down at the phone.
“Yeah,” I said. “That about sums it up.”
“No wonder he knew all about Pat and Jenny’s relationship.”
“Right. The little prick: he was sitting back laughing at us, the whole time.”
A corner of Richie’s mouth twitched. “Didn’t look like he was laughing to me.”
“He won’t be when he sees that picture, anyway. But he’s not going to see it till we’re good and ready. I want all our ducks in a row before we go anywhere near Conor again. You wanted a motive? I’d bet a lot of money that trail starts right here.”
“It could go back a long way.” Richie tapped the screen. “That there, that’s six years ago. If Conor and the Spains were best buds back then, they’d already known each other for a while. We’re talking college at least, probably school. The motive could be anywhere along the way. Something happens, everyone forgets all about it, then Conor’s life goes to shite and all of a sudden something from fifteen years ago feels like a huge big deal again . . .”
He was talking like he believed, at last, that Conor was our boy. I bent closer over the phone, to hide a smile. “Or it could be a lot more recent. Sometime in the last six years, the relationship went so far south that the only way Conor could see his goddaughter was through binoculars. I’d love to know what happened there.”
“We’ll find out. Talk to Fiona, talk to all their old mates—”
“Yeah, we will. We’ve got the little bastard now.” I wanted to grab Richie in a headlock, like we were a pair of idiot teenagers bonding by giving each other dead arms. “Richie, my friend, you just earned your whole year’s salary.”
Richie grinned, reddening. “Ah, no. We’d have worked it out sooner or later.”
“We would, yeah. But sooner is an awful lot better. We can take half a dozen floaters off trying to work out if Conor and Jenny bought petrol at the same station in 2008, and that gives us half a dozen extra chances at finding those clothes before a bin lorry takes them away . . . You’re the Man of the Match, my friend. Give yourself a big pat on the back.”
He shrugged, rubbing his nose to cover the blush. “’S just luck.”
“Bollix. There’s no such thing. Luck only comes in useful on the back of good solid detective work, and that’s exactly what you had there. You tell me: what do you want to do next?”
“Fiona Rafferty. Fast as we can.”
“Hell yes. You ring her; she liked you better than me.” Admitting it didn’t even sting. “See how soon you can get her to come in to HQ. Get her down there inside two hours, and lunch is on me.”
Fiona was at the hospital—in the background, that machine was steadily beeping away—and even her “Hello?” sounded exhausted to breaking point.
Richie said, “Ms. Rafferty, it’s Detective Curran. Have you got a minute?”
A second’s silence. “Hang on,” Fiona said. Muffled, through a hand over the phone: “I’ve got to take this. I’ll only be outside, OK? Call me if you want me.” The click of a door, and the beeping vanished. “Hello?”
Richie said, “Sorry to take you away from your sister. How’s she getting on?”
A moment’s silence. “Not great. Same as yesterday. That’s when you talked to her, right? Before we were even allowed in.”
There was an edge to Fiona’s voice. Richie said, calmly, “For a few minutes, yeah, we did. We didn’t want to tire her out too much.”
“Are you going to come back and keep asking her questions? Because don’t. She hasn’t got anything to tell you. She doesn’t remember anything. Mostly she can’t even talk. She just cries. All of us just cry.” Fiona’s voice was shaking. “Can you just . . . leave her alone? Please?”