He sounded genuinely curious. Conor said, “I wanted to. Thought about it all the time. But Pat, he’s a stubborn bollix. If things had been going great for him, then he’d have been delighted to hear from me again. But with everything gone to shite, with me having been right . . . he’d have slammed the door in my face.”
“You could’ve tried anyway.”
“Yeah. I could’ve.”
The bitterness in his voice burned. Richie was leaning forward, his head bent close to Conor’s. “And you feel bad about that, right? About not even trying.”
“Yeah. I feel like shit.”
“So would I, man. What would you do to make up for it?”
“Whatever. Anything.”
Richie’s clasped hands were almost touching Conor’s. He said, very gently, “You’ve done great for Pat. You’ve been a good mate; you’ve taken good care of him. If there’s someplace after we die, he’s thanking you now.”
Conor stared at the floor and bit down on his lips, hard. He was trying not to cry.
“But Pat’s dead, man. Where he is now, there’s nothing left that can hurt him. Whatever people know about him, whatever people think: it doesn’t matter to him now.”
Conor caught his breath, one great raw heave, and bit down again.
“Time to tell me, man. You were up in your hide, and you saw Pat going for Jenny. You legged it down there, but you were too late. That’s what happened, isn’t it?”
Another heave, wrenching his body like a sob.
“I know you wish you’d done more, but it’s time to stop making up for that. You don’t need to protect Pat any more. He’s safe. It’s OK.”
He sounded like a best friend, like a brother, like the one person in the world who cared. Conor managed to look up, openmouthed and gasping. In that moment I was sure Richie had him. I couldn’t tell which one was strongest: the relief, or the shame, or the fury.
Then Conor leaned back in the chair and dragged his hands over his face. He said, through his fingers, “Pat never touched them.”
After a moment Richie eased backwards too. “OK,” he said, nodding. “OK. Grand. Just one more question, and I’ll fuck off and leave you alone. Answer me this and Pat’s in the clear. What did you do to the kids?”
“Get your doctors to tell you.”
“They have. Like I told you before: cross-checking.”
No one had gone upstairs from the kitchen, after the bloodshed began. If Conor had come running when he saw the struggle, he had come through the back door, into the kitchen, and he had left the same way, without ever going upstairs. If he knew how Emma and Jack had died, it was because he was our man.
Conor folded his arms, braced a foot against the table and shoved his chair around to face me, giving Richie his back. His eyes were red. He said, to me, “I did it because I was mad for Jenny and she wouldn’t go near me. That’s the motive. Put that in a statement. I’ll sign.”
*
The corridor felt cold as a ruin. We needed to take Conor’s statement and send him back to his cell, update the Super and the floaters, write up our reports. Neither of us moved away from the interview-room door.
Richie said, “You all right?”
“Yeah.”
“Was that OK? What I did. I wasn’t sure if . . .”
He let it trail off. I said, without looking at him, “Thanks. I appreciate it.”
“No problem.”
“You were good, in there. I thought you had him.”
Richie said, “So did I.” His voice sounded strange. We were both near the end of our strength.
I found my comb and tried to get my hair back in place, but I had no mirror and I couldn’t focus. I said, “That motive he’s giving us, that’s crap. He’s still lying to us.”
“Yeah.”
“There’s still something we’re missing. We’ve got all of tomorrow, and most of tomorrow night if we need it.” The thought made me close my eyes.
Richie said, “You wanted to be sure.”
“Yeah.”
“Are you?”
I groped for that feeling, that sweet patter of things falling into all the right places. It was nowhere; it felt like some pathetic fantasy, like a child’s stories about his stuffed toys fighting off the monsters in the dark. “No,” I said. My eyes were still closed. “I’m not sure.”
*
That night I woke up hearing the ocean. Not the restless, insistent shove and tug of the waves on Broken Harbor; this was a sound like a great hand stroking my hair, the miles-wide roll of breakers on some gentle Pacific beach. It was coming from outside my bedroom door.
Dina, I told myself, feeling my heartbeat in the roof of my mouth. Dina watching something on the TV, to put herself to sleep. The relief took my breath away. Then I remembered: Dina was somewhere else, on Jezzer’s flea-ridden sofa, in a reeking laneway. For an upside-down second my stomach jerked with pure terror, like I was the one on my own with nobody to keep down the wilds of my mind, like she was the one who had been protecting me.
I kept my eyes on the door and eased open the drawer of my bedside table. The cold weight of my gun was comforting, solid. Outside the door the waves soothed on, unperturbed.
I had the bedroom door open, my back against the wall and my gun up and ready all in one move. The living room was empty and dark, wan rectangles of off-black in the windows, my coat huddled over the arm of the sofa. There was a thin line of white light around the kitchen door. The sound of waves surged louder. It was coming from the kitchen.
I bit down on the inside of my cheek till I tasted blood. Then I moved across the living room, carpet prickling at the soles of my feet, and kicked the kitchen door open.
The fluorescent strip light under the cupboards was on, giving an alien glow to a knife and half an apple I had forgotten on the countertop. The roar of the ocean rose up and rolled over me, blood-warm and skin-soft, like I could have dropped my gun and let myself fall forwards into it, let myself be carried away.
The radio was off. All the appliances were off, only the fridge humming grimly to itself—I had to lean close to catch the sound, under the waves. When I could hear that and the snap of my fingers, I knew there was nothing wrong with my hearing. I pressed my ear against the neighbors’ wall: nothing. I pressed harder, hoping for a murmur of voices or a snip of a television show, something to prove that my apartment hadn’t transformed into something weightless and free-floating, that I was still anchored in a solid building, surrounded by warm life. Silence.
I waited for a long time for the sound to fade. When I understood that it wasn’t going to, I switched off the strip light, closed the kitchen door and went back to my bedroom. I sat on the edge of the bed, pressing circles into my palm with the barrel of the gun and wishing for something I could shoot, listening to the waves sigh like some great sleeping animal and trying to remember turning the strip light on.