Once their suspicions were raised, none of the posters wanted to look like suckers: everyone had, apparently, been wondering all along if Pat-the-lad was a troll, an aspiring writer looking for inspiration (Remember that guy last year on the Structural Issues board with the walled-up room and the human skull? The short story showed up on his blog a month later? Piss off, troll), a scammer building towards a pitch for money. Within a couple of hours, the general consensus was that if Pat had been for real, he would have put down poison a long time ago, and that any day now he would be back to announce that the mysterious animal had eaten his imaginary kids and ask for help paying for their funerals.
“Jaysus,” Richie said. “They’re a bit harsh.”
“This? Hardly. If you got online more, you’d know this is nothing. It’s a wilderness out there; the normal rules don’t apply. Decent, polite people who don’t raise their voices from one year’s end to the next buy a modem and turn into Mel Gibson on tequila slammers. Compared to a lot of the stuff you see, these guys were being real sweethearts.”
Pat had seen it Richie’s way, though: when he came back, he came back furious. Look you pack of wankers I am NOT A FUCKING TROLL OK???? I know you spend all your time on this board but I actually have a fucking LIFE, if I was going to waste my time messing w someones head it wouldnt be you lot of losers, just trying to deal w WHAT IS IN MY ATTIC + if you useless twats cant help me w that then you can FUCK OFF. And he was gone.
Richie whistled softly. “That there,” he said, “that’s not just the internet talking. Like you said, Pat was a level-headed guy. To get like that”—he nodded at the screen—“he must’ve been well freaked out.”
I said, “He had reason to be. Something nasty was in his home, scaring his family. And everywhere he turned, people refused to help him. Wildwatcher, the pest-control guy, this board here: all of them basically told him to bugger off, it wasn’t their problem; he was on his own. In his place, I think you’d be well freaked out too.”
“Yeah. Maybe.” Richie reached out to the keyboard, glancing at me for permission, and scrolled back up to reread. When he was done he said, carefully, “So. No one but Pat ever actually heard this yoke.”
“Pat and Jack.”
“Jack was three. Kids that age, they’re not the best with what’s real and what’s not.”
“So you’re with Jenny,” I said. “You figure Pat was imagining it.”
Richie said, “Your man Tom. He wouldn’t swear to it that there was ever an animal in the attic.”
It was after half past eight. Down the corridor, the cleaner was playing chart music on her radio and singing along; outside the incident-room windows, the sky was solid black. Dina had been AWOL for four hours. I didn’t have time for this. “And he wouldn’t swear there wasn’t, either. But you feel that this somehow supports your theory that Pat slaughtered his family. Am I right?”
Richie said, picking the words, “We know he was under plenty of stress. There’s no two ways about that. From what he says on here, sounds like the marriage wasn’t doing great, either. If he was in bad enough shape that he was imagining things . . . Yeah, I think that’d make it more likely he went off the deep end.”
“He didn’t imagine those leaves and that piece of wood that appeared in the attic. Not unless we did too. I may have my issues, but I don’t believe I’m hallucinating quite yet.”
“Like the lads on the board said, those could’ve been a bird. They’re not proof of some mad animal. Any man who wasn’t stressed to fuck would’ve thrown them in the bin, forgotten all about them.”
“And the squirrel skeletons? Were those a bird too? I’m not a wildlife expert, any more than Pat was, but I have to tell you: if we’ve got some bird in this country that’ll decapitate squirrels, eat the flesh and line up the leftovers, nobody told me.”
Richie rubbed the back of his neck and watched my screen saver spiral in slow geometric patterns. He said, “We didn’t see the skeletons. Pat didn’t keep those. The leaves, yeah; the skeletons, the bit that would’ve actually proved there was something dangerous up there, no.”
The flash of irritation made me clamp my jaw tight for a second. “Come on, old son. I don’t know what you keep in your bachelor pad, but I promise you, a married man who tells his wife he wants to store squirrel skeletons in the wardrobe is in for a short sharp shock and a few nights on the sofa. And what about the kids? You think he wanted the kids finding those?”
“I don’t know what the man wanted. He’s all about showing his wife that this yoke exists, but when he gets solid proof, he backs right off: ah, no, couldn’t do that, wouldn’t want to freak her out. He’s dying to get a look at it, but when the pest-control fella says he should get in a specialist: ah, no, waste of money. He’s begging this board to help him figure out what’s up there, he offers to post photos of the flour on the attic floor, photos of the leaves, but when he finds the skeletons—and they could’ve had teeth marks on them—not a word about pics. He’s acting . . .” Richie glanced sideways at me. “Maybe I’m wrong, man. But he’s acting like, deep down, he knows there’s nothing there.”
For a strong, fleeting second I wanted to grab him by the neck and shove him away from the computer, tell him to piss off back to Motor Vehicles, I would handle this case myself. According to the floaters’ reports, Pat’s brother Ian had never heard anything about any animal. Neither had his old workmates, the friends who had been at Emma’s birthday party, the few people he had still been e-mailing. This explained why. Pat couldn’t bring himself to tell them, in case they reacted like everyone else, from strangers on discussion boards to his own wife; in case they reacted like Richie.
I said, “Just asking, son. Where do you think the skeletons materialized from? The pest-control guy saw them, remember. They weren’t all in Pat’s mind. I know you think Pat was going off his rocker, but do you seriously think he was biting the heads off squirrels?”
Richie said, “I didn’t say that. But no one except Pat saw the pest-control guy, either. We’ve only that post to say that he ever called someone in. You said yourself: people lie, on the internet.”
I said, “So let’s find the pest-control guy. Get one of the floaters on to tracking him down. Have him start with the numbers Pat got from the board; if none of those pan out, then he needs to check every company in a hundred-mile radius.” The thought of a floater coming in on this angle, another cool pair of eyes reading through those posts and another face slowly taking on the same look Richie had worn, tightened my neck again. “Or, better yet, we’ll do it ourselves. First thing tomorrow morning.”
Richie tipped my mouse with one finger and watched Pat’s posts flick back to life. He said, “Should be easy enough to find out.”
“Find out what?”
“Whether the animal exists. Couple of video cameras—”
“Because that worked so well for Pat?”
“He didn’t have cameras. The baby monitors, they don’t record; he could only catch what was happening in real time, when he had a chance to keep an eye out. Get a camera, set it up to record that attic round the clock . . . Inside a few days, if there’s anything there, we ought to get a look at it.”
For some reason the idea made me want to bite his head off. I said, “That’s going to look just great on the request form, isn’t it? ‘We’d like to request a valuable piece of department equipment and a massively overworked technician, on the off chance that we might possibly catch a glimpse of some animal that, whether it exists or not, has absolutely sweet fuck-all to do with our case.’”
“O’Kelly said, anything we need—”
“I know he did. The request would be approved. That’s not the point. You and me, we’ve got a certain amount of brownie points with the Super right now, and personally I’d rather not blow the lot on having a look at a mink. Go to the fucking zoo.”
Richie shoved his chair back and started circling the incident room restlessly. “I’ll fill out the form. That way it’s only me blowing my brownie points.”
“No you bloody won’t. You’ll make it sound like Pat was some kind of gibbering maniac seeing pink gorillas in his kitchen. We had a deal: no pointing the finger at Pat until and unless you’ve got evidence.”
Richie whirled on me, both hands slamming down on someone’s desk, sending papers flying. “How am I supposed to get evidence? If you put the brakes on, any time I start off on something that could go somewhere—”
“Calm down, Detective. And lower your voice. You want Quigley popping in to find out what’s going on?”
“The deal was we investigate Pat. Not I mention investigating Pat once in a while and you shoot me down. If the evidence is out there, how the fuck am I supposed to get to it? Come on, man. Tell me. How?”
I pointed at my monitor. “What does this look like we’re doing? Investigating Pat bloody Spain. No, we’re not calling him a suspect to the world. That was the deal. If you feel like it’s not fair on you—”
“No. Fuck not being fair on me. I don’t care. It’s not fair on Conor Brennan.”
His voice was still rising. I made mine stay even. “No? I’m not seeing what a video camera would do for him. Say we set up and catch nothing: how does the lack of otters invalidate Brennan’s confession?”
Richie said, “Tell me this. If you believe Pat, why aren’t you all for the cameras? One shot of a mink, a squirrel, even a rat, and you can tell me to fuck off. You sound the same as Pat, man: you sound like you know there’s nothing there.”
“No, chum. I don’t. I sound like I don’t give a damn whether there’s anything there or not. If we pick up nothing, what does that prove? The animal could have been scared off, could have got killed by a predator, could be hibernating . . . Even if it never existed, that doesn’t put this on Pat. Maybe the noises were something to do with the subsidence, or the plumbing, and he overreacted and read too much into them. That would make him a guy under stress, which we already knew. It wouldn’t make him a killer.”
Richie didn’t argue with that. He leaned back on a desk, pressing his fingers into his eyes. After a moment he said, more quietly, “It’d tell us something. That’s all I’m asking for.”
The argument, or fatigue, or Dina, had heartburn rolling up into my throat. I tried to swallow it down without grimacing. “OK,” I said. “You fill out the request form. I’ve got to head, but I’ll sign it before I leave—better have both our names on there. Don’t go requesting any strippers.”
“I’m doing my best here,” Richie said, into his hands. There was a note in his voice that caught at me: something raw, something lost, something like a wild call for help. “I’m just trying to get this right. Man, I swear to God, I’m trying.”
Every rookie feels like the world is going to stand or fall on his first case. I didn’t have time to hand-hold Richie through it, not with Dina out there, wandering, shooting off the kind of fractured strobe-light glitter that draws predators from miles around. “I know you are,” I said. “You’re doing fine. Double-check your spelling; the Super’s picky about that.”
“Yeah. OK.”
“Meanwhile, we’ll forward this link to Whatshisname, Dr. Dolittle—he might spot something in there. And I’ll have Kieran check out Pat’s account on this board, see if he sent or received any private messages. A couple of these guys sounded like they were getting pretty invested in his story; maybe one of them got into some kind of correspondence with him, and Pat gave him a few more details. And we’ll need to find the next discussion board he went to.”
“There mightn’t be a next one. He tried two boards, neither one of them was any use . . . He could’ve given up.”
“He didn’t give up,” I said. On my monitor, cones and parabolas moved gracefully in and out of one another, folded in on themselves and vanished, unfurled and began their slow dance all over again. “The man was desperate. You can take that any way you want to, you can say it was because he was losing his marbles if that’s what you want to believe, but the fact remains: he needed help. He’d have kept looking online, because he had nowhere else to look.”