“When did you leave this in the Spains’ house?”
Conor had taken a breath to answer, but something caught him: I saw the sudden stiffening of his shoulders. He said, “I don’t remember.”
“Don’t even try that, chum. It’s not funny any more. When did you leave the badge?”
After a moment Conor said, “Sunday night.”
My eyes met Richie’s, across his head. I said, “This Sunday night just gone.”
“Yeah.”
“What time?”
“Five in the morning, maybe.”
“With all the Spains at home and asleep, a few yards away. I’ll say this for you, chum: you’ve certainly got a pair.”
“I just went in the back door, put it on the counter and left. I waited till Pat had gone to bed—he didn’t stay downstairs that night. No big deal.”
“What about the alarm?”
“I know the code. Watched Pat typing it in.”
Surprise, surprise. “Still,” I said. “It was risky. You must have been pretty desperate to get this done, am I right?”
“I wanted her to have it.”
“Of course you did. And twenty-four hours later, Jenny’s dying and her family’s dead. Don’t even try to tell me that’s a coincidence, Conor.”
“I’m not trying to tell you anything.”
“So what happened? She wasn’t happy with your little present? Wasn’t grateful enough? She shoved it in a drawer instead of wearing it?”
“She put it in her pocket. Don’t know what she did with it after that, and I don’t care. I just wanted her to have it.”
I got both hands on the back of Conor’s chair and said, low and hard and straight into his ear, “You’re so full of shit you make me want to flush your head down the jacks. You know damn well what Jenny thought of the badge. You knew it wasn’t going to scare her, because you put it into her hand yourself. Is that how you were working it, the two of you? She’d sneak downstairs late at night, leave Pat sleeping, and the two of you would fuck on the kids’ beanbag?”
He whipped round to face me, eyes like shards of ice. He wasn’t leaning back away from me, not this time; our faces were almost touching. “You make me sick. If you think that, if you honest to God think that, there’s something wrong with you.”
He wasn’t afraid. It came as a shock: you get used to people being afraid of you, guilty or innocent. Maybe, whether we admit it or not, all of us like it. Conor had no reason left to be afraid of me.
I said, “Fine: so it wasn’t on the beanbag. In your hideout? What are we going to find, when we swab that sleeping bag?”
“You swab away. Knock yourself out. She was never there.”
“Then where, Conor? On the beach? In Pat’s bed? Where did you and Jenny bump your uglies?”
He had his fists clenched on the folds of his jeans to stop himself from punching me. That couldn’t last, and I couldn’t wait. “I’d never have touched her. She’d never have touched me. Never. Are you too thick to get that?”
I laughed in his face. “Of course you would have. Oh, poor little lonely Jenny, stuck out there in that nasty estate: she just needed to know someone cared about her. Isn’t that what you said? You were gagging to be that guy. All that shite about her being sooo lonely, that was just a handy excuse so you could bang her without feeling guilty about Pat. When did it start?”
“Never. You’d do it, then that’s your problem. You’ve never had a real friend, never been in love, then that’s your problem.”
“Some real friend you were. That animal that was sending Pat over the edge: that was you, all along.”
That icy, incredulous stare again. “What are you—”
“How’d you do it? I’m not bothered about the noises—we’re going to trace the place where you bought the sound system, sooner or later—but I’d love to know just how you got the flesh off those squirrels. Knife? Boiling water? Your teeth?”
“I haven’t got a clue what you’re on about.”
“Fine. I’ll let our lab fill me in on the squirrels. Here’s the thing I really want to know: was it just you, this animal? Or was Jenny in on it too?”
Conor shoved back his chair, hard enough that it went tumbling, and stalked off across the room. I went after him so fast I didn’t even feel myself move. My rush backed him against the wall. “You don’t fucking walk away from me. I’m talking to you, sonny boy. When I talk, you fucking listen.”
His face was rigid, a mask carved from hard wood. He was staring past me, eyes narrowed and focused on nothing.
“She was helping you, wasn’t she? Did the two of you have a laugh about it, up in your little hideout? That eejit Pat, that sucker, falling for every piece of crap you fed him—”
“Jenny did nothing.”
“Everything was going so well, wasn’t it? Pat getting crazier every day, Jenny snuggling up closer to you. And then this happened.” I shoved the evidence bag at him, so close that I felt it brush his cheek. I just managed not to grind it into his face. “Turned out to be a big mistake, didn’t it? You thought it’d be a lovely romantic gesture, but all it did was send Jenny on a massive guilt trip. Like you said, she was happy, that summer. Happy with Pat. And you went and reminded her of it. All of a sudden, she felt like shit about slutting around on him. She decided it had to stop.”
“She wasn’t slutting—”
“How did she tell you? A note in your hideout? She didn’t even bother to break it off face-to-face, did she?”
“There was nothing to break off. She didn’t even know I was—”
I threw the evidence bag somewhere and slammed my hands against the wall on either side of Conor’s head, pinning him in. My voice was rising and I didn’t care. “Did you decide right then that you were going to kill them all? Or were you just going to get Jenny, and then you figured what the hell, might as well go the whole hog? Or was this how you planned it all along: Pat and the kids dead, Jenny alive and in hell?”
Nothing. I banged my hands off the wall; he didn’t even jump.
“All this, Conor, all of this, because you wanted Pat’s life instead of getting your own. Was it worth it? How good a fuck is this woman?”
“I never—”
“Shut the fuck up. I know you were banging her. I know it. I know it for a fact. I know it because that’s the only way this whole fucking nightmare makes any sense.”
“Get away from me.”
“Make me. Come on, Conor. Hit me. Push me away. Just one shove.” I was shouting, straight into his face. My palms hit the wall again and again and the judders ran up through my bones, but if there was pain I didn’t feel it. I had never done anything like this before and I couldn’t remember why because it felt incredible, it felt like pure savage joy. “You were a big man when you were fucking your best mate’s wife, big man when you were smothering a three-year-old—where’s the big man now that you’re up against someone your own size? Come on, big man, show me what you’ve got—”
Conor wasn’t moving a muscle, those narrow eyes were still fixed on the nothing over my shoulder. We were almost touching from faces to shoes, inches between us, less. I knew the video camera would never catch it, just one jab to the stomach, one lift of the knee, Richie would back me up— “Come on, you motherfucker, you cocksucker, hit me, I’m begging you, give me an excuse—”