Ryan - 04 - Broken Harbour Read online

  Richie had his notebook out, writing. I said, “Check all the sites for a sparklyjenny, or variations on that—jennysparkly, that kind of thing. If they didn’t get clever with their passwords, odds are they didn’t get clever with their IDs.”

  I could almost hear Kieran rolling his eyes. “Um, yeah, that had actually occurred to me. No other sparklyjennys yet, but we’ll keep looking. Any chance of, like, just getting the IDs off the vic? Save us a load of time.”

  “She hasn’t come round yet,” I said. “Our guy wiped that history for a reason. I’m thinking maybe he’d been stalking Pat or Jenny online. Check out the last few days’ worth of posts on each forum. If there’s been any drama in the last while, it shouldn’t be hard to find.”

  “Who, me? Are you for reals? Get a random eight-year-old to read forums till his brain cells commit mass suicide. Or, like, a chimpanzee.”

  “Have you seen the amount of media attention this case is getting, old son? We need our best and our brightest on this one, every step of the way. No chimpanzees here.” Kieran did a long, exasperated sigh, but he didn’t argue. “Focus on the last week, to start with. If we need to go deeper, we can.”

  “Who’s this ‘we,’ Kemosabe? I mean, not being smart, but remember, I’ll probably turn up more sites as the recovery software does its thing. If your vics hit a bunch of different forums, me and my boys can check them out fast or we can check them out in depth. Take your pick.”

  “Fast should do it for the sports boards, unless you spot something good. Just have a quick skim for any recent drama. On the mums-and-kids and the home-and-garden one, go into depth.” Online as well as off, women are the ones who talk.

  Kieran groaned. “I was afraid you’d say that. The mommy board is like Armageddon; there’s some kind of nuclear war going on about ‘controlled crying.’ I’d have been totally fine living the entire rest of my life without finding out what that is.”

  “Like the man says, chum, education is never a waste. Grin and bear it. You’re looking for a stay-at-home mum with a background in PR, a six-year-old daughter, a three-year-old son, a mortgage in arrears, a husband who got laid off in February, and a full set of financial problems. Or we’ll assume you are. We could be very wrong, but we’ll go with that for now.”

  Richie glanced up from his notebook. “What d’you mean?”

  I said, “Online, Jenny could have had seven kids, a stockbroking firm and a mansion in the Hamptons. She could’ve been living in a hippie commune in Goa. People lie on the net. Surely that doesn’t come as a surprise.”

  “Lie like rugs,” Kieran agreed. “All the time.”

  Richie was giving me a skeptical look. “On dating sites, yeah, they do. Add a few inches, knock off a few pounds, give yourself a Jag or a PhD, means you get to shop in the luxury section. But feeding crap to a bunch of other women you’re never gonna meet? Where’s the percentage in that?”

  Kieran snorted. “I’ve got to ask, Kemosabe. Has your other half ever been online?”

  I said, “If you can’t stand your own life, these days, you go online and get a new one. If everyone you’re talking to believes you’re a jet-set rock star, then they treat you like one; and if that’s how everyone treats you, then that’s how you feel. When you come right down to it, how is that different from actually being a jet-set rock star, at least part-time?”

  The skeptical look had grown. “Because you’re not a bleeding jet-set rock star. You’re still Bobby Bollix from Accounting. You’re still sitting in your one-bed apartment in Blanchardstown eating Scooby Snax, even if you have the world thinking you’re drinking champagne in a five-star hotel in Monaco.”

  “Yes and no, Richie. Human beings aren’t that simple. Life would be a lot more straightforward if all that mattered was what you actually are, but we’re social animals. What other people think you are, what you believe you are: those matter too. Those make a difference.”

  “Basically,” Kieran said cheerfully, “people talk crap to impress each other. Nothing new there. They’ve done it in meatspace since forever; cyberspace just makes it easier.”

  I said, “Those boards could have been the place where Jenny got away from everything that was wrong in her life. She could have been anyone, out there.”

  Richie shook his head, but it had gone from disbelieving to baffled. Kieran asked, “So what do you want me to look for?”

  “Keep an eye out for anyone who fits her stats, but if no one matches, that doesn’t mean she’s not there. Look for anyone who’s having serious trouble with another poster, anyone who mentions being stalked or harassed—online or off—anyone who mentions her husband or her kid being stalked or harassed. If you find anything good, call us. Any luck on the e-mails?”

  Keys clicking in the background. “So far, just a bunch of fragments. I’ve got a mail from someone called Fi, back in March, wanting to know if Emma has the Ultimate Box Set of Dora the Explorer, and I’ve got someone in the house submitting a CV for a recruitment job in June, but apart from that it’s basically spam spam spam. Unless ‘Make your rod harder for her pleasure’ is some kind of secret code, we’ve got nothing.”

  I said, “Then keep looking.”

  Kieran said, “Chillax. Like you said, your dude didn’t wipe the machine just to show off his mad skills. Sooner or later, something’s gonna show.”

  He hung up. Richie said softly, “Sitting out there, middle of nowhere, playing rock star for people you’ll never meet. How bloody lonely would you have to be?”

  I left my mobile off speaker while I checked my voice mail, just in case—Richie took the hint and slid away from me on the wall, squinting into his notebook like the killer’s home address was in there somewhere. I had five messages. The first one was from O’Kelly, bright and early, wanting to know where I was, why Richie hadn’t managed to pull in our man last night, whether he was wearing something that wasn’t a shiny tracksuit, and whether I wanted to change my mind and partner up with an actual Murder D on this one. The second one was from Geri, apologizing all over again about last night and hoping work was all right and hoping Dina felt better: “And listen to me, Mick, if she’s still not doing great, I can take her tonight, no bother—Sheila’s on the mend and Phil’s practically grand, he’s only got sick the once since midnight, so you just drop her over to ours as soon as you get the chance. I mean it, now.” I tried not to think about whether Dina had woken up yet, and what she had thought of being locked in.

  The third message was from Larry. He and his boys had run the prints from the sniper’s nest through the computer, got nothing: our man wasn’t in the system. The fourth one was O’Kelly again: same message as before, this time with free bonus swearing. The fifth one had come in just twenty minutes earlier, from some doctor, upstairs. Jenny Spain was awake.

  One of the reasons I love Murder is that the victims are, as a general rule, dead. The friends and relations are alive, obviously, but we can palm them off on Victim Support after an interview or two, unless they’re suspects, in which case talking to them doesn’t run your mind through a shredder quite the same way. I don’t make a habit of sharing this, in case people take me for a sicko or—worse—a wimp, but give me a dead child, any day, over a child sobbing his heart out while you make him tell you what the bad man did next. Dead victims don’t show up crying outside HQ to beg for answers, you never have to nudge them into reliving every hideous moment, and you never have to worry about what it’ll do to their lives if you fuck up. They stay put in the morgue, light-years beyond anything I can do right or wrong, and leave me free to focus on the people who sent them there.

  What I’m getting at is that going to see Jenny Spain in hospital was my worst work-related nightmare come true. A part of me had been praying that we would get the other phone call, the one to say she had let go without ever regaining consciousness, that there had been a borderli
ne to her pain.

  Richie’s head had turned towards me, and I realized my hand was clenched around the phone. He said, “News, yeah?”

  I said, “Looks like we can ask Jenny Spain for those IDs after all. She’s awake. We’re going upstairs.”

  * * *

  The doctor outside Jenny’s room was fair and skinny, trying hard to make himself older with a middle-aged parting and the beginnings of a beard. Behind him, the uniform at the door—maybe because I was tired, everyone looked about twelve—took one look at me and Richie and snapped to attention, chin tucked in.

  I held up my ID. “Detective Kennedy. Is she still awake?”

  The doctor gave the ID a careful going-over, which was good. “She is, yeah. I doubt you’ll get a lot of time with her, though. She’s on powerful painkillers, and injuries on this scale are exhausting in themselves. I’d say she’ll be falling asleep soon.”

  “She’s out of danger, though?”

  He shrugged. “No guarantees. Her prognosis is brighter than it was a couple of hours ago, and we’re cautiously optimistic about her neurological function, but there’s still a massive risk of infection. We’ll have a better idea in a few days.”

  “Has she said anything?”

  “You know about the facial injury, don’t you? She has a hard time talking. She told one of the nurses she was thirsty. She asked me who I was. And she said, ‘It hurts,’ two or three times, before we upped the painkillers. That’s it.”

  The uniform should have been in there with her, in case that changed, but I had told him to guard the door, and by God he was guarding it. I could have kicked myself for not using an actual detective with a functioning brain, instead of some pubescent drone. Richie asked, “Does she know? About her family?”

  The doctor shook his head. “Not as far as I can tell. I’m guessing there’s a certain amount of retrograde amnesia. It’s common enough after a head injury; usually transient, but again, no guarantees.”

  “And you didn’t tell her, no?”

  “I thought you might want to do that yourselves. And she hasn’t asked. She . . . well, you’ll see what I mean. She’s not in great shape.”

  He had been keeping his voice low, and on that his eyes slid over my shoulder. I had missed her, up until then: a woman, asleep in a hard plastic chair up against the corridor wall, with a big flowered purse clutched on her lap and her head canted back at a painful angle. She didn’t look twelve. She looked at least a hundred—white hair falling out of its bun, face swollen and discolored from crying and exhaustion—but she couldn’t have been over about seventy. I recognized her from the Spains’ photo albums: Jenny’s mother.

  The floaters had taken a statement from her the day before. We would have to come back to her sooner or later, but at that moment there was more than enough agony waiting for us inside Jenny’s room, without stocking up in the corridor. “Thanks,” I said, a lot more quietly. “If anything changes, let us know.”

  We gave our IDs to the drone, who examined them from every angle for about a week. Mrs. Rafferty shifted her feet and moaned in her sleep, and I almost shouldered the uniform out of our way, but luckily he picked that moment to decide we were legit. “Sir,” he said smartly, handing back the IDs and stepping away from the door, and then we were inside Jenny Spain’s room.

  No one would ever have known her for the platinum girl shining in those wedding photos. Her eyes were closed, eyelids puffy and purple. Her hair, straggling on the pillow from under a wide white bandage, was stringy and darkened to mouse-brown by days without washing; someone had tried to get the blood out of it, but there were still matted clumps, strands sharpened into hard points. A pad of gauze, stuck down with sloppy strips of tape, covered her right cheek. Her hands, small and fine like Fiona’s, were slack on the bobbled pale-blue blanket, a thin tube running into a great mottled bruise; her nails were perfect, filed to delicate arcs and painted a soft pinkish-beige, except the two or three that had been ripped away down to the quick. More tubing ran from her nose up around her ears, snaked down her chest. All around her machines beeped, clear bags dripped, light flashed off metal.

  Richie closed the door behind us, and her eyes opened.

  She stared, dazed and dull-eyed, trying to figure out whether we were real. She was fathoms deep in the painkillers. “Mrs. Spain,” I said, gently, but she still flinched, hands jerking up to defend herself. “I’m Detective Michael Kennedy, and this is Detective Richard Curran. Would you be able to talk to us for a few minutes?”

  Slowly Jenny’s eyes focused on mine. She whispered—it came out thick and clotted, through the damage and the bandage—“Something happened.”

  “Yes. I’m afraid so.” I turned a chair to the side of the bed and sat down. Across from me, Richie did the same.

  “What happened?”

  I said, “You were attacked, in your home, two nights ago. You were seriously wounded, but the doctors have been taking good care of you, and they say you’re going to be fine. Can you remember anything about the attack?”

  “Attack.” She was struggling to swim to the surface, through the vast weight of drugs bearing down on her mind. “No. How . . . what . . .” Then her eyes came alive, flaring incandescent blue with pure terror. “The babies. Pat.”

  Every muscle in my body wanted to fling me out the door. I said, “I’m so sorry.”

  “No. Are they—where—”

  She was fighting to sit up. She was much too weak to do it, but not too weak to rip stitches trying. “I’m so sorry,” I said again. I cupped a hand around her shoulder and pressed down, as gently as I could. “There was nothing we could do.”

  The moment after those words has a million shapes. I’ve seen people howl till their voices were scraped away, or freeze like they were hoping it would pass them over, prowl on to rip out someone else’s rib cage, if they just stayed still enough. I’ve held them back from smashing their faces off walls, trying to knock out the pain. Jenny Spain was beyond any of that. She had done all her defending two nights before; she had none left for this. She dropped back on the worn pillowcase and cried, steadily and silently, on and on.

  Her face was red and contorted, but she didn’t move to cover it. Richie leaned over and put a hand on hers, the one without the IV line, and she gripped it till her knuckles whitened. Behind her a machine beeped, faintly and steadily. I focused on counting the beeps and wished to God I had brought water, gum, mints, anything that would let me swallow.

  After a long time, the crying wore itself away and Jenny lay still, cloudy red eyes staring at the flaking paint on the wall. I said, “Mrs. Spain, we’re going to do everything we can.”

  She didn’t look at me. That thick, ragged whisper: “Are you sure? Did you . . . see them yourself?”

  “I’m afraid we’re sure.”

  Richie said gently, “Your babies didn’t suffer, Mrs. Spain. They never knew what was happening.”

  Her mouth started to convulse. I said quickly, before she could get lost in it again, “Mrs. Spain, can you tell us what you remember about that night?”

  She shook her head. “I don’t know.”

  “That’s OK. We understand. Could you take a moment and think back, see if anything comes to you?”

  “I don’t . . . There’s nothing. I can’t . . . ”

  She was tensing up, her hand tightening on Richie’s again. I said, “That’s fine. What’s the last thing you do remember?”

  Jenny gazed at nothing and for a moment I thought she had drifted away, but then she whispered, “The babies’ bath. Emma washed Jack’s hair. Got shampoo in his eyes. He was going to cry. Pat . . . his hands in the sleeves of Emma’s dress, like it was dancing, to make Jack laugh . . .”

  “That’s good,” I said, and Richie gave her hand an encouraging squeeze. “That’s great. Any little thing could hel
p us. And after the children’s bath . . . ?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t know. The next thing was here, that doctor—”

  “OK. It might come back to you. Meanwhile, can you tell me whether there’s anyone who’s bothered you, over the past few months? Anyone who worried you? Maybe someone you knew was acting a bit odd, or you saw someone around who made you nervous?”

  “No one. Nothing. Everything’s been fine.”

  “Your sister Fiona mentioned that you had a break-in during the summer. Can you tell us about that?”

  Jenny’s head stirred on the pillow, like something hurt. “That was nothing. Not a big deal.”

  “Fiona sounded like it was a pretty big deal at the time.”

  “Fiona exaggerates. I was just stressed that day. I got worried about nothing.”

  Richie’s eyes met mine, across the bed. Somehow, Jenny was managing to lie.

  I said, “There are a number of holes in the walls of your home. Do those have anything to do with the break-in?”

  “No. Those are . . . They’re nothing. They’re just DIY stuff.”

  “Mrs. Spain,” Richie said. “Are you sure?”

  “Yeah. I’m positive.”

  Through all the fog of drugs and damage, something in her face glinted dense and hard as steel. I remembered what Fiona had said: Jenny isn’t a wimp.

  I asked, “What kind of DIY stuff?”

  We waited, but Jenny’s eyes had clouded over again. Her breathing was so shallow that I could barely see her chest rise and fall. She whispered, “Tired.”

  I thought about Kieran and his ID hunt, but there was no way she would be able to find those in the wreckage of her mind. I said gently, “Just a few more questions, and we’ll let you rest. A woman called Aisling Rooney—her son Karl was a friend of Jack’s from preschool—she mentioned that she tried to get in touch over the summer, but you stopped returning her calls. Do you remember that?”