I don’t talk to witnesses this way. My bedside manner may not be the finest, I may have a rep for being cold or brusque or whatever people want to call it, but I had never in my career done anything like this. It wasn’t because I hadn’t wanted to. Don’t fool yourself: we all have a cruel streak. We keep it under lock and key either because we’re afraid of getting punished or because we believe this will somehow make a difference, make the world a better place. No one punishes a detective for giving a witness a little scare. I’ve heard plenty of the lads do worse, and nothing ever happened.
I said, “Talk.”
“Ma.”
Sinéad said, “It was that yoke there.” She nodded at the baby monitor, lying on its side on the coffee table.
“What was?”
“Sometimes they get their wires crossed, or whatever you call it.”
“Frequencies,” Jayden said. He looked a lot happier, now that his mother was talking. “Not wires.”
“You shut up. This is all your fault, you and your bleeding tenner.” Jayden shoved himself away from her, along the floor, and slumped into a sulk. “Whatever you call them, they get crossed. Sometimes—not all the time; maybe every couple of weeks, like—that yoke picked up their monitor, instead of ours. So we could hear what was going on in there. It wasn’t on purpose or nothing, I don’t be listening in on people”—Sinéad managed a self-righteous look that didn’t suit her—“but we couldn’t help hearing.”
“Right,” I said. “And what did you hear?”
“I told you, I don’t be earwigging on other people’s conversations. I paid no notice. Just switched the monitor off and then on again, to reset it. I only ever heard a few seconds, like.”
“You listened for ages,” said Jayden. “You made me turn down my game so you could hear better.”
Sinéad shot him a glare that said he was in deep shit as soon as we left. For this, she had been ready to let a murderer walk free: so she could look like a good respectable housewife, to herself if not to us, instead of a nosy, petty, furtive little bitch. I’d seen it a hundred times, but it made me want to slap the fourth-hand look of virtue right off her ugly face. I said, “I don’t give a damn if you spent your days under the Spains’ window with an ear trumpet. I just want to know what you heard.”
Richie said matter-of-factly, “Anyone would’ve listened, sure. Human nature. At first you’d no choice, anyway: you needed to figure out what was going on with your monitor.” His voice had that ease again: he was back on form.
Sinéad nodded vigorously. “Yeah. Exactly. The first time it happened, I nearly had a heart attack. Middle of the night, all of a sudden there’s a kid calling, ‘Mummy, Mummy, come here,’ right in my ear. First I thought it was Jayden, only it sounded way too young, and he doesn’t call me Mummy anyway; and Baby was only born. Scared the life out of me.”
“She screamed,” Jayden told us, smirking. He had apparently recovered. “She thought it was a ghost.”
“I did, yeah. So? My husband woke up then, and he figured it out, but anyone would’ve been freaking. So what?”
“She was going to get a psychic out. Or one of those ghost hunters.”
“You shut up.”
I said, “When was this?”
“Baby’s ten months now, so January, February.”
“And after that you heard it every couple of weeks, for a total of about twenty times. What did you hear?”
Sinéad was still furious enough to glass me, but a gossip about the uppity neighbors was impossible to resist. “Mostly just boring sh— stuff. The first few times, it was himself reading some story to put one of the kids to sleep, or it was the young fella jumping on his bed, or the young one talking to her dollies. Around the end of summer, but, they must’ve moved the monitors downstairs or something, ’cause we started hearing other stuff. Like them watching the telly, or her showing the young one how to make chocolate chip cookies—wouldn’t just buy them from the shop like the rest of us, she was too good for that. And once—middle of the night again—I heard her say, ‘Just come to bed. Please,’ like she was begging, and him saying, ‘In a minute.’ Didn’t blame him; it’d be like shagging a bag of potatoes.” Sinéad tried to catch Richie’s eye for a shared smirk, but he stayed blank. “Like I said. Boring.”
I said, “And the ones that weren’t boring?”
“There was only the once.”
“Let’s hear it.”
“It was one afternoon. She was just after getting in, I guess from picking up the young one from school. We were in here, Baby was having his nap so I’d the monitor out, and all of a sudden there’s your woman, yapping away. I almost switched it off, ’cause I swear she’d make you sick, but . . .”
Sinéad gave a defiant little shrug. I said, “What was Jennifer Spain saying?”
“Talking her head off. She’s like, ‘Now let’s get ready! Your daddy’s going to be home from his walk any minute, and when he gets in, we’re going to be happy. Very very happy.’ She’s all perky”—Sinéad’s lip curled—“like some American cheerleader. Don’t know what she had to be perky about. She’s, like, arranging the kids, telling the little girl to sit right here and have a dolly picnic, and the young fella to sit over here and not be throwing his Lego, ask nicely if he wants a hand. She goes, ‘Everything’s going to be lovely. When your daddy gets in, he’s going to be sooo happy. That’s what you want, isn’t it? You don’t want Daddy to be unhappy, do you?’”
“‘Mummy and Daddy,’” said Jayden, under his breath, and snorted.
“She was going on like that for ages, till the monitor cut out. See what I mean about her? She was like your woman off Desperate Housewives, the one that has to have everything perfect or she loses the head. It was like, Jaysus, relax. My husband goes, ‘D’you know what that one needs? She needs a good—’”
Sinéad remembered who she was talking to and cut herself off, with a stare to show she wasn’t afraid of us. Jayden sniggered.
“To be honest with you,” she said, “she sounded bleeding mental.”
I asked, “When was this?”
“A month back, maybe. Middle of September. See what I mean? Nothing to do with anything.”
Not like anyone off Desperate Housewives; like a victim. Like every battered woman and man I had dealt with, back in Domestic Violence. Every one of them had been sure that their partners would be happy and everything in the garden would be rosy, if they could just get it right. Every one of them had been terrified, to a point somewhere between hysteria and paralysis, of getting it wrong and making Daddy unhappy.
Richie had gone still, no more foot-jiggling: he had spotted it too. He said, “That’s why the first thing you thought, when you saw our lot outside, was that Pat Spain had killed his wife.”
“Yeah. I thought maybe if she didn’t have the house clean, or if the kids were bold, he gave her the slaps. Just goes to show you, doesn’t it? There she was, all up herself, with her fancy gear and her posh accent, and all the time he’s beating the bollix out of her.” Sinéad couldn’t keep the smirk off the corners of her mouth. She had liked the idea. “So when yous showed up, I figured it had to be that. She burned the dinner or something, and he went ballistic.”