“Would you recognize him if you saw him again, would you?”
“Yeah. Probably.”
I leaned over to my briefcase and found the photo array. One of the floaters had put it together for us that morning, and he had done a good job: six twenty-somethings, all lean, with close-cropped brown hair and plenty of chin. Jayden would need to come down to HQ for a formal lineup, but we could at least eliminate the possibility that he had given his key to some unrelated weirdo.
I passed the array to Richie, who held it out to Jayden. “Is he in here?”
Jayden milked it for all it was worth: tilting the sheet at different angles, holding it up to eye level and squinting at it. Finally he said, “Yeah. This guy.”
His finger was on the middle shot in the bottom row: Conor Brennan. Richie’s eyes met mine for a second.
“Jaysus Christ,” Sinéad said. “He was talking to a murderer.” She sounded somewhere between awestruck and outraged. I could see her trying to work out who to sue.
Richie said, “You’re sure, Jayden?”
“Yeah. Number Five.” Richie reached to take back the array sheet, but Jayden was still staring at it. “Was he the guy that killed them all?”
I saw the quick flicker of Richie’s eyelids. “It’ll be up to the court and the jury to decide what he did.”
“If I hadn’t’ve given him the key, would he have killed me?”
His voice sounded fragile. The ghoulishness was gone; all of a sudden he just looked like a scared little kid. Richie said gently, “I don’t think so. I can’t swear to it, but I’d bet you were never in any danger, not even for a second. Your mammy’s right, though: you shouldn’t talk to strangers. Yeah?”
“Is he gonna come back?”
“No. He’s not coming back.”
Richie’s first slip: you don’t make that promise, at least not when you still need leverage. “That’s what we’re trying to make sure of,” I said smoothly, stretching out a hand for the sheet. “Jayden, you’ve been a great help, and it’ll make a big difference. But we need all the help we can get, to keep this guy where he is. Mr. Gogan, Mrs. Gogan: you’ve also had a couple of days to think back and see whether you know something that might help us. Does anything come to mind? Anything you’ve seen, heard, anything out of place? Anything at all?”
There was a silence. The baby started to make small complaining snuffles; Sinéad reached out a hand, without looking, and jiggled its cushion till it stopped. Neither she nor Gogan was looking at anyone.
In the end Sinéad said, “Can’t think of anything.” Gogan shook his head.
We let the silence grow. The baby wriggled and set up a high, protesting whine; Sinéad picked it up and bounced it. Her eyes across its head were cold, flat as her husband’s, defiant.
Finally Richie nodded. “If you think of anything, yous have my card. Meanwhile, do us a favor, yeah? There’s a few newspapers out there that might be interested in Jayden’s story. Keep it to yourselves for a few weeks, OK?”
Sinéad went lipless with outrage; obviously she had already been planning her shopping spree and deciding where to get her makeup done for the photo shoot. “We can talk to whoever we like. You can’t stop us.”
Richie said calmly, “The papers’ll still be there in a couple of weeks’ time. When we have this fella sorted, I’ll give you the go-ahead and you can give them a ring. Until then, I’m asking you to do us a favor and not impede our investigation.”
Gogan got the threat, even if she didn’t. He said, “Jayden’ll talk to no one. Is that all, yeah?”
He stood up. “One last thing,” Richie said, “and we’ll be out of your way. Can we borrow your back door key for a minute?”
It opened the Spains’ back door like it had been oiled. The lock clicked open and the last link in that chain clicked into place, a taut glinting thread running from Conor’s hide straight into the violated kitchen. I almost raised a hand to high-five Richie, but he was looking out over the garden wall, at the empty window-holes of the hide, not at me.
“And that’s how the blood smears got on the paving stones,” I said. “He went out the same way he came in.”
Richie’s fidgets had come back; his fingertips were drumming a fast tattoo on the side of his thigh. Whatever was bothering him, the Gogans hadn’t fixed it. He said, “Pat and Jenny. How’d they end up here?”
“What do you mean?”
“Three in the morning, both of them in their pajamas. If they were in bed and Conor came after them, how’d they end up struggling down here? Why not in the bedroom?”
“They caught him on the way out.”
“That’d mean he was only after the kids. Doesn’t fit with the confession: he was all about Pat and Jenny. And wouldn’t they have checked on the kids first thing when they heard noise, stayed trying to help them? Would you care about an intruder getting away, if your kids were in trouble?”
I said, “There’s still plenty about this case that needs explaining. I’m not denying that. But remember, this wasn’t just any intruder. This was their best mate—or their ex–best mate. That could have made a difference to the way things went down. Let’s wait and see what Fiona has to tell us.”
“Yeah,” Richie said. He pushed the door open and cold air swept into the kitchen, stripping away the stagnant layer of blood and chemicals, turning the room, for a breath, fresh and stirring as morning. “Wait and see.”
I found my phone and rang the uniforms—they needed to send down whoever was handy with the padlocks, before the Gogans decided to set up a nice little sideline selling souvenirs. While I waited for someone to pick up, I said to Richie, “That was a good interrogation.”
“Thanks.” He sounded nowhere near as pleased with himself as he should have. “We know why Conor made up that story about finding Pat’s key, anyway. Keep Jayden out of trouble.”
“Sweet of him. Plenty of killers feed stray puppies, too.”
Richie was looking out at the garden, which had already started to take on an abandoned feel—weeds pushing up above the grass, a blue plastic bag left to flap from the bush where it had blown. “Yeah,” he said. “Probably they do.” He slammed the back door—the final rush of cold air fluttered the stray papers left to drift on the floor—and turned the key again.
Gogan was waiting at his front door to get his key back. Jayden was behind him, hanging off the door handle. When Richie handed over the key, Jayden squirmed out, under his father’s arm. “Mister,” he said, to Richie.
“Yeah?”
“If I hadn’t have given your man the key. Would they not have got kilt?”
He was staring up at Richie with real, sharp horror in those pale eyes. Richie said, gently but very firmly, “This wasn’t your fault, Jayden. It’s the fault of the person who did the job. End of story.”
Jayden twisted. “But how would he have got in if he didn’t have the key?”
“He would’ve found a way. Some stuff is gonna find a way to happen; once it’s got started, you can’t stop it, no matter what you do. This whole thing got started a long time before you ever met this fella. Yeah?”
The words slid down my skull, dug in at the back of my neck. I shifted, trying to get Richie moving, but he was focused on Jayden. The kid looked about half convinced. After a moment, he said, “I guess.” He slipped back under his father’s arm and vanished into the dim hall. In the moment before Gogan shut the door, he caught Richie’s eye and gave him a small, reluctant nod.