*
She was alone. The room felt almost summery: the day was bright, and someone had opened the window a crack, so that a breeze toyed with the blinds and the fug of disinfectant had dissipated to a faint clean tang. Jenny was propped up on pillows, staring at the shifting pattern of sun and shadow on the wall, hands loose and unmoving on the blue blanket. With no makeup she looked younger and plainer than she had in the wedding photos, and somehow less nondescript, now that the little quirks showed—a beauty spot on the unbandaged cheek, an irregular top lip that made her look ready to smile. It wasn’t a remarkable face in any way, but it had a clean-lined sweetness that brought up summer barbecues, golden retrievers, soccer games on new-mown grass, and I have always been caught by the pull of the unremarkable, by the easily missed, infinitely nourishing beauty of the mundane.
“Mrs. Spain,” I said. “I don’t know if you remember us: Detective Michael Kennedy and Detective Richard Curran. Would it be all right if we came in for a few minutes?”
“Oh . . .” Jenny’s eyes, red-rimmed and puffy, moved over our faces. I managed not to flinch. “Yeah. I remember. I guess . . . yeah. Come in.”
“No one’s here with you today?”
“Fiona’s at work. My mum had an appointment about her blood pressure. She’ll be back in a while. I’m fine.”
Her voice was still hoarse and thick, but she had looked up quickly when we came in: her head was starting to clear, God help her. She seemed calm, but I couldn’t tell whether it was the stupefaction of shock or the brittle glaze of exhaustion. I asked, “How are you feeling?”
There was no answer to that. Jenny’s shoulders moved in something like a shrug. “My head hurts, and my face. They’re giving me painkillers. I guess they help. Did you find out anything about . . . what happened?”
Fiona had kept her mouth shut, which was good, but interesting. I shot Richie a warning glance—I didn’t want to bring up Conor, not while Jenny was so slowed and clouded that her reaction would be worthless—but he was focusing on the sun coming through the blinds, and there was a tense set to his jaw. “We’re following a definite line of inquiry,” I said.
“A line. What line?”
“We’ll keep you posted.” There were two chairs by the bed, cushions squashed into their angles where Fiona and Mrs. Rafferty had tried to sleep. I took the one closest to Jenny and pushed the other towards Richie. “Can you tell us anything more about Monday night? Even the smallest thing?”
Jenny shook her head. “I can’t remember. I’ve been trying, I’m trying all the time . . . but half the time I just can’t think, because of the drugs, and the other half my head hurts too much. I think probably once I’m off the painkillers and they let me out of here—once I’m home . . . Do you know when . . . ?”
The thought of her walking into that house made me wince. We were going to have to talk to Fiona about hiring a cleaning team, or having Jenny stay at her flat, or both. “I’m sorry,” I said. “We don’t know anything about that. What about before Monday night? Can you think of anything out of the ordinary that happened recently—anything that worried you?”
Another shake of Jenny’s head. Only fragments of her face showed, behind the bandage; it made her hard to read. “The last time we spoke,” I said, “we started discussing the breakins you had over the past few months.”
Jenny’s face turned towards me, and I caught a spark of wariness: she knew something was off—she had only told Fiona about one—but she couldn’t find what. “That? Why does that matter?”
I said, “We have to examine the possibility that they could be connected to the attack.”
Jenny’s eyebrows pulled together. She could have been drifting, but some immobility said she was struggling hard to think, through that fog. After a long minute she said, almost dismissively, “I told you. It wasn’t a big deal. To be honest, I’m not sure there even were any breakins. It was probably just the kids moving things.”
I said, “Could you give us the details? Dates, times, things you noticed missing?” Richie found his notebook.
Her head moved restlessly on the pillow. “God, I don’t remember. Back in, I don’t know, maybe July? I was tidying up, and there was a pen and some ham slices missing. Or I thought there might be, anyway. We’d all been out that day, so I just got a bit nervous in case I’d forgotten something unlocked and someone had come in—there’s squatters living in some of the empty houses, and sometimes they come poking around. That’s all.”
“Fiona said you accused her of using her keys to get in.”
Jenny’s eyes went to the ceiling. “I told you before: Fiona turns everything into a big deal. I didn’t accuse her of anything. I asked if she’d been in our house, because she’s the only one who had the keys. She said no. End of story. It wasn’t, like, some big drama.”
“You didn’t ring the local police?”
Jenny shrugged. “And say what? Like, ‘I can’t find my pen, and someone’s eaten some ham slices out of the fridge’? They’d have laughed. Anyone would’ve laughed.”
“Did you change the locks?”
“I changed the alarm code, just in case. I wasn’t going to get all the locks done when I didn’t even know if anything had happened.”
I said, “But even after you changed the alarm code, there were other incidents.”
She managed a little laugh, brittle enough to shatter against the air. “Oh my God, incidents? This wasn’t a war zone. You make it sound like someone was, like, bombing our sitting room.”
“I might have the details wrong,” I said smoothly. “What exactly did happen?”
“I don’t even remember. Nothing big. Could this wait? My head’s killing me.”
“We just need a few more minutes, Mrs. Spain. Could you set me straight on the details?”
Jenny put her fingertips gingerly to the back of her head, winced. I felt Richie shift his feet and glance at me, ready to leave, but I didn’t move. It’s a strange sensation, being played by the victim; it goes against the grain to look at the wounded creature we’re supposed to be helping, and see an adversary we need to outwit. I welcome it. Give me a challenge any day, over a mass of flayed pain.
After a moment Jenny let her hand fall back into her lap. She said, “Just the same kind of thing. Smaller, even. Like a couple of times the curtains in the sitting room were pulled back all wrong—I straighten them out when I hook them behind the holdback, so they’ll fall right, but a couple of times I found them all twisted up. See what I mean? It was probably the kids playing hide-and-seek in them, or—”
The mention of the children made her catch her breath. I said quickly, “Anything else?”
Jenny let her breath out slowly, got herself back. “Just . . . stuff like that. I keep candles out, so the house always smells nice—I’ve got a bunch of them in one of the kitchen cupboards, all different smells, and I change them every few days. Once in the summer, maybe August, I went to get the apple one and it was gone—and I knew I’d had it just the week before, I remembered seeing it. But Emma always loved that one, the apple one; she could have taken it to play with in the garden or somewhere, and forgotten it.”
“Did you ask her?”
“I don’t remember. It was months ago. It wasn’t a big deal.”
I said, “Actually, it sounds quite disturbing. You weren’t frightened?”
“No. I wasn’t. I mean, even if we did have some weird burglar, he was only after, like, candles and ham; that’s not exactly terrifying, is it? I thought if there was someone, it was probably just one of the children from the estate—some of them run completely wild; they’re like apes, screaming and throwing stuff at your car when you drive past. I thought maybe one of them, on a dare. But probably not even that. Things go missing, in houses. Do you ring the police every time one of your socks disappears in the wash?”
“So even when the incidents kept happening, you still didn’t change the locks.”
“No. I didn’t. If there was anyone coming in, just if, then I wanted to catch them. I didn’t want them heading off to bother someone else; I wanted them stopped.” The memory brought Jenny’s chin up, gave a tough set to her jaw and a cool, fight-ready intentness to her eyes; it swept away that nondescript quality, turned her vivid and strong. She and Pat had been a good match: fighters. “After a while, sometimes when we went out I didn’t even set the alarm, on purpose—so if someone did get in, they might stay till I came back and caught them. See? I wasn’t frightened.”