13
Fiona was waiting for us outside HQ, drooping against a lamppost. In the circle of smoky yellow light, with the hood of her red duffle coat pulled up against the cold, she looked like some small lost creature out of fireside stories. I ran a hand over my hair and locked Dina down in the back of my mind. “Remember,” I said to Richie, “she’s still on the radar.”
Richie caught a deep breath, like the exhaustion had blindsided him all of a sudden. He said, “She didn’t give Conor the keys.”
“I know. But she knew him. There’s history there. We need to know a lot more about that history before we can rule her out.”
Fiona straightened up as we came closer. She had lost weight in the last two days; her cheekbones poked out sharply, through skin that had faded to a papery gray. I could smell the hospital off her, disinfected and polluting.
“Ms. Rafferty,” I said. “Thank you for coming in.”
“Could we just . . . Would it be OK if we made this quick? I want to get back to Jenny.”
“I understand,” I said, stretching out an arm to guide her towards the door. “We’ll be as fast as we can.”
Fiona didn’t move. Her hair straggled around her face in limp brown waves; it looked like she had washed it in a sink with hospital soap. “You said you got the man. The man who did this.”
She was talking to Richie. He said, “We’ve got someone in custody in connection with the crimes. Yeah.”
“I want to see him.”
Richie hadn’t spotted that coming. I said smoothly, “I’m afraid he’s not here. We’ve got him in jail at the moment.”
“I need to see him. I need . . .” Fiona lost her train of thought, shook her head and shoved back hair. “Can we go there? To the jail?”
“It doesn’t really work that way, Ms. Rafferty. It’s out of hours, we’d have to fill in the paperwork, then it could take a few hours to bring him over here, depending on the available security . . . If you want to get back to your sister, we’ll need to leave that for another time.”
Even if I had left her room to argue, she didn’t have the energy. After a moment she said, “Another time. I can see him another time?”
“I’m sure we can work something out,” I said, and held out my arm again. This time Fiona moved, out of the circle of lamplight and into the shadows, towards the door of HQ.
One of the interview rooms is set up to be gentle: carpet instead of linoleum, clean pale-yellow walls, non-institutional chairs that don’t leave your arse bruised, a watercooler, an electric kettle and a basket of little sachets of tea and coffee and sugar, actual mugs instead of foam cups. It’s for victims’ families, fragile witnesses, suspects who would take the other rooms as an affront to their dignity and stalk out. We put Fiona there. Richie settled her—it was nice, having a partner who could be trusted with someone that shaky—while I went down to the incident room and threw a few bits of evidence into a cardboard box. By the time I got back, her coat was on the back of her chair and she was curled around a steaming mug of tea like her whole body needed warming. Without the coat she was slight as a child, even in the loose jeans and oversized cream cardigan. Richie was sitting opposite her, elbows propped on the table, halfway through a long reassuring story about an imaginary relative who had been saved from some dramatic combination of injuries by the doctors at Jenny’s hospital.
I slid the box unobtrusively under the table and took a chair next to Richie. He said, “I was just telling Ms. Rafferty, her sister’s in good hands.”
Fiona said, “The doctor said in a couple of days they’re going to lower the dose of painkillers. I don’t know how Jenny’s going to cope. She’s in really bad shape anyway—obviously—but the painkillers help, half the time she thinks it’s just a bad dream. When she comes off them, and the whole thing hits her . . . Can they give her something else? Antidepressants, or something?”
“The doctors know what they’re at,” Richie said gently. “They’ll help her get through.”
I said, “I’m going to ask you to do something for us, Ms. Rafferty. While you’re here, I need you to forget about what happened to your family. Put it out of your mind; just concentrate, one hundred percent, on answering our questions. Believe me, I know that sounds impossible, but it’s the only way you can help us put this man away. This is what Jenny needs from you right now—what they all need from you. Can you do that for them?”
This is the gift we offer them, people who loved the victims: rest. For an hour or two they get to sit still and—guilt-free, because we gave them no choice—stop hurling their minds on the jagged shards of what happened. I understand how immense that is, and how priceless. I saw the layers in Fiona’s eyes, like I’d seen them in hundreds of others’: relief, and shame, and gratitude.
She said, “OK. I’ll try.”
She would tell us things she had never wanted to mention, to give herself a reason to keep talking. “We appreciate that,” I said. “I know it’s difficult, but you’re doing the right thing.”
Fiona balanced her tea on her thin knees, cupping it between her hands, and gave me her full attention. Already her spine had uncurled a notch. I said, “Let’s start at the beginning. There’s a good chance none of this will be relevant, but it’s important for us to get all the information we can. You said Pat and Jenny got together when they were sixteen, isn’t that right? Can you tell me how they met?”
“Not exactly. We’re all from the same area, so we knew each other from around, ever since we were little kids, like in primary school; I don’t remember the exact first time any of us met. When we got to like twelve or thirteen, a bunch of us started hanging out together—just messing about on the beach, or Rollerblading, or we’d go down to Dun Laoghaire and hang out on the pier. Sometimes we went into town, for the cinema and then Burger King, or on the weekends we’d go to the school discos if there was a good one on. Just kid stuff, but we were close. Really close.”
Richie said, “There’s no one like the mates you make when you’re a teenager. How many in the gang?”
“Jenny and me. Pat and his brother Ian. Shona Williams. Conor Brennan. Ross McKenna—Mac. There were a couple of others who hung out with us sometimes, but that was the real gang.”
I rummaged in my cardboard box, found a photo album—pink cover, flowers made of sequins—and flipped it open at a Post-it. Seven teenagers perched on a wall, squashed together to fit in the shot, laughter and brandished ice cream cones and bright T-shirts. Fiona had braces, Jenny’s hair was a shade darker; Pat had his arms wrapped around her—his shoulders were already as broad as a man’s, but his face was a boy’s, open and ruddy—and she was taking a huge mock-bite out of his ice cream. Conor was all gangly legs and arms, doing a goofy chimpanzee impression, falling off the wall. I said, “Is this the gang?”
Fiona put her tea down on the table—too quickly; a few drops slopped out—and reached out a hand to the album. She said, “That’s Jenny’s.”
“I know,” I said gently. “We needed to borrow it, just for a while.”
It made her shoulders jump, the sudden feel of our fingers probing deep into their lives. “God,” she said, involuntarily.
“We’ll have it back to Jenny as soon as possible.”
“Can you . . . If you get done with it in time, maybe could you just not tell her you had it? She doesn’t need anything else to deal with. This . . .” Fiona spread her hand across the photo. She said, so quietly I barely heard her, “We were really happy.”
I said, “We’ll do our best. You can help there, too. If you can give us all the info we need, then we can avoid asking Jenny these questions.”
She nodded, without looking up. “Well done,” I said. “Now, this has to be Ian. Am I right?” Ian was a couple of years younger than Pat, skinnier and brown-haired, but the resemblance was obvious.
“Yeah, that’s Ian. God, he looks so young there . . . He was really shy, back then.”
I tapped Conor’s chest. “And who’s this?”
“That’s Conor.”
It came out promptly and easily, no tension around it. I said, “He’s the guy holding Emma in her christening photo, the one in her room. He’s her godfather?”
“Yeah.” The mention of Emma made Fiona’s face tighten up. She pressed her fingertips on the photo like she was trying to push herself into it.
I said easily, moving on to the next face, “Which makes this guy Mac, right?” Chubby and bristle-haired, outflung arms and pristine white Nikes. You could have told what generation these kids were just from their clothes: no hand-me-downs, nothing mended, everything was brand-new and brand name.
“Yeah. And that’s Shona.” Red hair, the kind that would have been frizzy if she hadn’t spent a lot of time with the straighteners, and skin that I would have bet was freckled under the fake tan and careful makeup. For a strange second I almost felt sorry for these kids. When I was that age, my friends and I were all poor together; it had very little to recommend it, but at least it had involved less effort. “Her and Mac, they were the ones who could always make us laugh. I’d forgotten her looking like that. She’s blond now.”
I asked, “So you all stay in touch?” I caught myself hoping the answer was yes—not for investigative reasons, but for Pat and Jenny, stranded on their cold deserted island, sea winds blowing. It would have been good to know that some roots had held strong for them.
“Not really. I have the others’ phone numbers, but it’s been ages. I should ring them, tell them, but I just . . . I can’t.”
She brought her mug to her mouth to hide her face. “Leave the numbers with us,” Richie said helpfully. “We’ll do it. No reason you should have to break the news.”
Fiona nodded, without looking at him, and fumbled in her pockets for her phone. Richie ripped a page out of his notebook and passed it to her. As she wrote I asked, moving her back towards safer ground, “It sounds like you were a pretty close-knit bunch. How did you get out of touch?”
“Just life, mostly. Once Pat and Jenny and Conor went to college . . . Shona and Mac are a year younger than them, and me and Ian are another year, so we weren’t on the same buzz any more. They could go to pubs, and proper clubs, and they were meeting new people at college—and without the three of them, the rest of us just didn’t . . . It wasn’t the same.” She handed the paper and pen back to Richie. “We all tried—at first we all still saw each other all the time. It was weird because suddenly we had to schedule stuff days in advance and someone was always pulling out at the last minute, but we did hang out. Gradually, though, it just got to be less and less. Even up until a couple of years ago, we still met up for a pint every few weeks, but it just . . . it stopped working.”
She had her hands wrapped around the mug again, tilting it in circles and watching the tea swirl. The smell of it was doing its job, making this alien place feel homey and safe. “Actually, it probably stopped working a long time before that. You can see it in the photos: we stop being jigsawed together like in that one there, instead we’re just these elbows and knees stuck out at each other, all awkward . . . We just didn’t want to see it. Pat, especially. The less it worked, the harder he tried. We’d be sitting on the pier or somewhere, and Pat’d be spread out till he was practically stretching, trying to keep close to all of us, make it feel like one big gang again. I think he was proud of it, that he still hung out with the same friends he’d had since he was a kid. That meant something to him. He didn’t want to let it go.”
She was unusual, Fiona: perceptive, acute, sensitive; the kind of girl who would spend a long time alone thinking about something she didn’t understand, picking away at it until the knot unraveled. It made her a useful witness, but I don’t like dealing with unusual people. “Four guys, three girls,” I said. “Three couples and an odd man out? Or just a gang of mates?”
Fiona almost smiled, down at the photo. “A gang of mates, basically. Even when Jenny and Pat started going out, it didn’t change things as much as you’d think. Everyone had seen it coming for ages, anyway.”
I said, “I remember you saying you dreamed about someone loving you the way Pat loved Jenny. The other lads were no prizes, no? You didn’t bother giving it a go with any of them?”