I gave her plenty of time to leave. Then I went out for a cigarette—Damien could look after himself, like a big boy, for a few more minutes. It was starting to get dark and it was still raining, thick apocalyptic sheets. I turned up the collar of my jacket and squashed uncomfortably into the doorway. My hands were shaking. Cassie and I had had fights before, of course we had; partners argue as ferociously as lovers. Once I got her so furious that she slammed her hand down on her desk and her wrist swelled up, and we didn’t speak for almost two days. But even that had been different; utterly different.
I threw away my soggy cigarette half-smoked and went back inside. Part of me wanted to send Damien off for processing and go home and let Cassie deal with that when she came back to find us gone, but I knew I didn’t have that luxury: I needed to find out his motive, and I needed to do it in time to prevent Cassie from giving Rosalind the third degree.
Damien had started to catch up with events. He was almost frantic with anxiety, biting at his cuticles and jiggling his knees, and he couldn’t stop asking me questions: What would happen next? He was going to jail, right? For how long? His mother was going to have a heart attack, she had this heart condition…. Was jail really dangerous, was it like on TV? I hoped, for his sake, that he didn’t watch Oz.
Whenever I came too close to the subject of motive, though, he shut down: curled in on himself like a hedgehog, stopped meeting my eyes and started claiming memory loss. The argument with Cassie seemed to have thrown me off my rhythm; everything felt terribly unbalanced and irritating, and try as I might I couldn’t get Damien to do anything but stare at the table and shake his head miserably.
“All right,” I said at last. “Let me get a little background straight. Your father died nine years ago, is that correct?”
“Yeah.” Damien glanced up tentatively. “Almost ten; it’s his tenth anniversary at the end of October. Can I…when we’re finished here, can I, like, get bailed out?”
“Bail can only be decided by a judge. Does your mother work?”
“No. She’s got this, I told you…” He gestured vaguely towards his chest. “She gets disability. And my dad, he left us some…Oh, God, my mother!” He shot upright. “She’s gonna be going crazy—What time is it?”
“Relax. We spoke to her earlier; she knows you’re helping us with our inquiries. Even with the money your father left, it can’t be easy to make ends meet.”
“What?…Um, we do OK.”
“All the same,” I said, “if someone offered you a lot of money to do a job for him, you’d be tempted, wouldn’t you?” Fuck Sam, and fuck O’Kelly: if Uncle Redmond had hired Damien, I needed to know now.
Damien’s eyebrows drew together in what looked like genuine confusion. “What?”
“I could name you a few people who had several million reasons to go after the Devlin family. The thing is, Damien, they aren’t the kind to do their own dirty work. They’re the type who use hired help.”
I paused, giving Damien a chance to say something. He merely looked dazed.
“If you’re afraid of someone,” I told him, as gently as I could, “we can protect you. And if someone hired you to do this, then you’re not the real killer, are you? He is.”
“What—I didn’t—what? You think someone paid me to, to…Jesus! No!”
His mouth was open in pure, shocked indignation. “Well, if it wasn’t for money,” I inquired, “then why was it?”
“I told you, I don’t know! I don’t remember!”
For an extremely unpleasant instant, it occurred to me to wonder whether he might, in fact, have lost a segment of his memory; and, if so, why and where. I dismissed the thought. We hear this one all the time, and I had seen the look on his face when he skipped the trowel: that had been deliberate. “You know, I’m doing my best to help you here,” I said, “but there’s no way for me to do that when you’re not being honest with me.”
“I’m being honest! I don’t feel good—”
“No, Damien, you’re not,” I said. “And here’s how I know. Do you remember those photos I showed you? Remember the one of Katy with her face hanging off? That was taken at the post-mortem, Damien. And the post-mortem told us exactly what you did to that little girl.”
“I already told you—”
I leaned across the table, fast, into his face. “And then, Damien, this morning, we found the trowel in the tools shed. How bloody stupid do you think we are? Here’s the part you skipped: after you killed Katy, you undid her combats and you pulled down her underwear and you shoved the handle of that trowel inside her.”
Damien’s hands went to the sides of his head. “No—don’t—”
“And you’re trying to tell me that just happened? Raping a little kid with a trowel doesn’t just happen, not without a damn good reason, and you need to stop fucking around and tell me what that reason was. Unless you’re just one sick little pervert. Is that it, Damien? Are you?”
I had pushed him too hard. With dreary inevitability, Damien—who, after all, had had a long day—started to cry again.
We were there for a long time. Damien, his face in his hands, sobbed hoarsely and convulsively. I leaned against the wall, wondering what the hell to do with him and occasionally, when he stopped for breath, taking another desultory shot at the motive. He never answered; I’m not sure he heard me. The room was too hot and I could still smell the pizza, rich and nauseating. I couldn’t focus. All I could think about was Cassie, Cassie and Rosalind: whether Rosalind had agreed to come in; whether she was holding up all right; whether Cassie was going to knock on the door, any moment, and want to put her face to face with Damien.
Finally I gave up. It was half past eight and this was pointless: Damien had had enough, the best detective in the world couldn’t have got anything coherent out of him at this point, and I knew I should have spotted this long before. “Come on,” I said to him. “Get some dinner and some rest. We’ll try this again tomorrow.”
He looked up at me. His nose was red and his eyes were swollen half shut. “I can go…go home?”
You’ve just been arrested for murder, genius, what do you think…. I didn’t have the energy for sarcasm. “We’ll be holding you overnight,” I said. “I’ll get someone to take you over.” When I brought out the handcuffs, he stared at them as if they were some medieval implement of torture.
The door of the observation room was open, and as we passed I saw O’Kelly standing in front of the glass, hands in his pockets, rocking back and forth on his heels. My heart gave a great thump. Cassie had to be in the main interview room: Cassie and Rosalind. For a moment I thought of going in there, but I rejected that idea instantly: I did not want Rosalind to associate me in any way with this whole debacle. I handed Damien—still dazed and white-faced, catching his breath in long shudders like a child who’s been crying too hard—over to the uniforms, and went home.
22
The land line rang at about quarter to midnight. I dived for it; Heather has Rules about phone calls after her bedtime.
“Hello?”
“Sorry to ring so late, but I’ve been trying to reach you all evening,” Cassie said.
I had switched my mobile to silent, but I had seen the missed calls. “I really can’t talk now,” I said.
“Rob, for fuck’s sake, this is important—”
“I’m sorry, I have to go,” I said. “I’ll be in work at some point tomorrow, or you can leave me a note.” I heard the quick, painful catch of breath, but I put the phone down anyway.
“Who was that?” demanded Heather, appearing in the door of her room wearing a nightie with a collar and looking sleepy and cross.
“For me,” I said.
“Cassie?”
I went into the kitchen, found an ice tray and started popping cubes into a glass. “Ohhh,” said Heather knowingly, behind me. “You finally slept with her, didn’t you?”
I threw the ice tray back into the freezer. Heather does leave me alone if I ask her to, but it’s never worth it: the resultant sulks and flounces and lectures about her unique sensitivity last much longer than the original irritation would have.
“She doesn’t deserve that,” she said. This startled me. Heather and Cassie dislike each other—once, very early on, I brought Cassie home for dinner, and Heather was borderline rude all evening and then spent hours after Cassie left plumping up sofa cushions and straightening rugs and sighing noisily, while Cassie never mentioned Heather again—and I wasn’t sure where this sudden access of sisterhood was coming from.
“Any more than I did,” she added, and went back into her bedroom and banged the door. I took my ice to my room and made myself a strong vodka and tonic.