Ryan - 04 - Broken Harbour Read online

  We set up our stuff where our man had set up his: against the back wall of the hide, for clear views of both the Spains’ kitchen—just in case—and the front window-hole, looking out over the beach, that he had used as a door. The plastic sheeting over the other holes would screen us from a watcher hidden in the jungle all around. The night was coming down cold, there would be frost before dawn; I spread out my sleeping bag to sit on, added another jumper under my coat. Richie knelt on the floor pulling stuff out of his holdall like a kid on a camping trip: a thermos, a packet of chocolate Hobnobs, a slightly squashed tower of sandwiches wrapped in tinfoil. “Starving,” he said. “Sandwich, yeah? I brought enough for the two of us, in case you didn’t get a chance.”

  I was about to say no automatically when I realized that he was right, I hadn’t remembered to bring food—Dina—and that I was starving too. “Thanks,” I said. “I’d love one.”

  Richie nodded and pushed the sandwich tower towards me. “Cheese and tomato, turkey, or ham. Take a few.”

  I took cheese and tomato. Richie poured strong tea into the thermos cap and tilted it at me; when I held up my water bottle, he downed the tea in one and poured himself another capful. Then he made himself comfortable with his back against the wall and got stuck into his sandwich.

  He didn’t look like he was under the impression that tonight would involve deep and meaningful conversation, which was good. I know other detectives get into heart-to-hearts on stakeouts. I don’t. One or two newbies had tried, either because they genuinely liked me or because they wanted to nuzzle up to the boss, I didn’t bother to find out which before I nipped that in the bud. “These are good,” I said, taking another sandwich. “Thanks.”

  Before it got dark enough for action stations, I checked in with the floaters. Our fake Fiona’s voice was steady, maybe too steady, but she said she was fine, thanks, no backup needed. Marlboro Man and his friend said we were the most exciting thing they’d seen all evening.

  Richie was working his way methodically through the sandwiches, gazing out past the last row of houses to the dark beach. The comforting fragrance of his tea made the room feel warmer. After a while he said, “I wonder did it actually use to be a harbor.”

  “It did,” I said. He would take it for granted that I had been researching, Mr. Boring using his scraps of free time to comb the internet. “This was a fishing village, a long time back. You might still be able to see what’s left of the pier, down at the south end of the beach, if you go looking.”

  “Is that why Broken Harbor, yeah? The broken-down pier?”

  “No. It’s from breacadh: daybreak. I suppose because it would have been a good place to watch the dawn.”

  Richie nodded. He said, “I’d say it was lovely out here, back before all this.”

  “It probably was,” I said. The smell of the sea swept over the wall and in through the empty window-hole, wide and wild with a million intoxicating secrets. I don’t trust that smell. It hooks us somewhere deeper than reason or civilization, in the fragments of our cells that rocked in oceans before we had minds, and it pulls till we follow mindlessly as rutting animals. When I was a teenager, that smell used to set me boiling, spark my muscles like electricity, bounce me off the walls of the caravan till my parents sprang me free to obey the call, bounding after whatever tantalizing once-in-a-lifetimes it promised. Now I know better. That smell is bad medicine. It lures us to leap off high cliffs, fling ourselves on towering waves, leave behind everyone we love and face into thousands of miles of open water for the sake of what might be on the far shore. It had been in our man’s nose, two nights before, when he climbed down the scaffolding and went over the Spains’ wall.

  Richie said, “They’ll say it’s haunted now. Kids.”

  “Probably.”

  “Be daring each other to run up and touch the door of the house. Go inside.”

  Below us, the lampshades Jenny had bought for her cozy family kitchen were bright with yellow butterflies. One of them was missing, gone to Larry’s lab. “You’re talking like it’s going to be abandoned for good,” I said. “Dial down the negativity there, old son. Jenny’ll need to sell up, once she’s able. Wish her luck. She could do with it.”

  Richie said bluntly, “A few more months and the whole estate’ll be abandoned. It’s dead in the water. No one’s gonna buy out here, and even if they were, there’s hundreds of houses to choose from. Are you telling me you’d pick that one?” He jerked his chin towards the window.

  “I don’t believe in ghosts,” I said. “And neither do you, not while you’re on the job, anyway.” I didn’t tell him: the ghosts I believe in weren’t trapped in the Spains’ bloodstains. They thronged the whole estate, whirling like great moths in and out of the empty doorways and over the expanses of cracked earth, battering against the sparse lighted windows, mouths stretched wide in silent howls: all the people who should have lived here. The young men who had dreamed of carrying their wives over these thresholds, the babies who should have been brought home from the hospital to soft nurseries in these rooms, the teenagers who should have had their first kisses leaning against lampposts that would never be lit. Over time, the ghosts of things that happened start to turn distant; once they’ve cut you a couple of million times, their edges blunt on your scar tissue, they wear thin. The ones that slice like razors forever are the ghosts of things that never got the chance to happen.

  Richie had demolished half the sandwiches and was rolling a piece of tinfoil into a ball between his palms. He said, “Can I ask something?”

  He practically raised his hand. It made me feel like I was sprouting gray hair and bifocals all over. I said, hearing the stuffy note in my voice, “You don’t need to ask my permission, Richie. That’s part of my job, answering any questions you’ve got.”

  “Right,” Richie said. “Then I was wondering how come we’re here.”

  “On this earth?”

  He didn’t know whether he was supposed to laugh. “No, I mean . . . Like, here. Doing the stakeout.”

  “You’d rather be at home in bed?”

  “No! I’m grand where I am; nowhere I’d rather be. I only wondered. Just . . . it doesn’t make any difference who’s here, does it? If our fella shows, he shows; anyone can bring him in. I would’ve expected you to . . . I don’t know. Delegate.”

  I said, “It probably won’t make any difference to the arrest, no. But it might make a difference to what comes next. If you’re the one who puts the cuffs on your guy, it gets the relationship off on the right foot: shows him who’s his daddy now, straight from the off. In an ideal world, I’d always be the one who made the collar.”

  “You’re not, but. Not every time.”

  “I’m not magic, my friend. I can’t be everywhere. Sometimes I have to give someone else a chance.”

  Richie said, “Not this time, but. No one else’s getting a look-in on this one till we both get tired enough that we fall over. Amn’t I right?”

  The grin in his voice felt good, the solid taking it for granted that we were in this together. “Right,” I said. “And I’ve got enough caffeine tabs to last us a while.”

  “Is it because it’s kids?”

  The grin had faded. “No,” I said. “If it were just the kids, then it’d be no big deal to let some floater take our guy down. But I want to be the one who gets the man who killed Pat Spain.”

  Richie waited, watching me. When I left it there, he said, “How come?”

  Maybe it was my cracking knees and the stiffness in my neck as I had pulled myself up the scaffolding, the dragging sense that I was moving towards old and tired; maybe that was what made me all of a sudden want to know what the other lads talk about, into the long tedious nights, that brings them into the squad room the next day walking in step, making shared decisions with just a tilt of the head or a lift of an eyebrow. Mayb
e it was those moments, over the past couple of days, when I had caught myself feeling like I wasn’t just showing a rookie the ropes; when it had felt like Richie and I were working together, side by side. Maybe it was that treacherous sea smell, eroding all my why-nots to shifting sand. Maybe it was just fatigue. “Tell me this,” I said. “What do you think would have happened if our guy had been just a little better at what he did? Cleaned up this place before he went hunting, got rid of his footprints, left the weapons on the scene?”

  “We’d have stuck with Pat Spain.”

  In the darkness I could barely see him, just the angle of his head against the window, the tilt of his chin towards me. “Yeah. Probably we would have. And even if we’d had a hunch that someone else was involved . . . What do you think other people would have thought, if we couldn’t put out a description, couldn’t come up with one piece of evidence that he even existed? That Gogan woman, the whole of Brianstown, the man on the street watching this case on the news. Pat and Jenny’s families. What would they have assumed?”

  Richie said, “Pat.”

  “Exactly like we did.”

  “And the real guy would’ve still been out there. Maybe getting ready to do it again.”

  “Maybe, yeah. But that’s not my point. Even if he went home last night and found a nice place to hang himself, this guy would have made Pat Spain into a murderer. In the eyes of everyone who’ll ever hear his name, Pat would have been a man who killed the woman who lay down with him. The children they made together.” Even saying the words set that high hum moving in my skull: evil.

  Richie said, almost gently, “He’s dead. It couldn’t hurt him.”

  “Yeah, he’s dead. Twenty-nine years of life are all he’ll ever have. He should have had fifty more, sixty, but this guy decided to take them all away. And even that wasn’t enough for him: he wanted to go back in time and take away those pathetic twenty-nine years, too. Take away everything Pat had ever been. Leave him with nothing.” I saw that evil like a low cloud of sticky black dust spreading slowly out from this room to cover the houses, the fields, blotting out the moonlight. “That’s fucked up,” I said. “That’s so fucked up I don’t even have words for it.”

  We sat there, not talking, while our Fiona found the dustpan and swept up shards of a plate that had smashed in a corner of the kitchen floor. After a while Richie opened his Hobnobs, offered me one and, when I shook my head, munched his way steadily through half the packet. After a while he said, “Can I ask something?”

  “Seriously, Richie, you’re going to have to knock that off. It’s not going to inspire confidence in our man if you put up your hand in the middle of an interrogation and ask me if you’re allowed to talk now.”

  This time he did grin. “Something personal, but.”

  I don’t answer personal questions, not from trainees, but then the whole conversation was one I don’t have with trainees. It took me by surprise, how good it felt, and how easy: to let go of veteran and rookie and all the boundaries that come with them, slip into being just one of two men talking. “Fire away,” I said. “If you’re over the line, I’ll tell you.”

  “What does your da do?”

  “He’s retired. He was a traffic warden.”

  Richie let out a snort of laughter. I said, “What’s funny there?”

  “Nothing. Just . . . I figured something a bit more posh. A teacher at a private school, like; geography, maybe. Now that you say it, though, it makes sense.”

  “Should I take that as a compliment?”

  Richie didn’t answer. He shoved another Hobnob in his mouth and rubbed crumbs off his fingers, but I could feel him thinking. After a while he said, “What you said at the scene the other day: how you don’t get killed unless you go looking for it. Bad things mostly happen to bad people. That’s a luxury, thinking that. D’you know what I mean?”

  I pushed away the nudge of something more painful than irritation. “Can’t say I do, old son. In my experience—and I don’t want to rub this in your face, but I’ve had more of that than you have—what you get out of life is mostly what you planted. Not always, no, but mostly. If you think you’re a success, you will be a success; if you think you deserve nothing but crap, you’ll get nothing but crap. Your inner reality shapes your outer one, every day of your life. Do you follow me?”

  Richie watched the warm yellow lights of the kitchen below us. He said, “I don’t know what my dad does; he wasn’t around.” He said it matter-

  of-factly, like it was something he had had to say too many times before. “I grew up in the flats—probably you knew that already. I saw loads of bad stuff happen to people who never asked for it. Loads.”

  I said, “And here you are. A detective on a top squad, doing the job you always wanted, working the biggest case of the year and damn close to a solve. Wherever you come from, that counts as success. I think you’re proving my point here.”

  Richie didn’t turn his head. “I’d say Pat Spain thought the same way as you.”

  “Maybe he did. So?”

  “So he still lost his job. Worked his arse off, thought positive, did everything right, ended up on the dole. How did he plant that?”

  “That was unfair as all hell, and I’ll be the first to say it shouldn’t have happened. But come on: there’s a recession on. Exceptional circumstances.”

  Richie shook his head. “Sometimes bad things just happen,” he said.

  The sky was rich with stars; it had been years since I had seen so many. Behind us, the sound of the sea and the sound of wind sweeping the long grass fused into one long soothing caress down the back of the night. I said, “You can’t think that way. Whether it’s true or not. You have to believe that somewhere along the way, somehow, most people get what they deserve.”

  “Or . . . ?”

  “Or how do you get up in the morning? Believing in cause and effect isn’t a luxury. It’s an essential, like calcium, or iron: you can go without it for a while, but in the end you’ll start eating yourself up from inside. You’re right: every now and then, life isn’t fair. That’s where we come in. That’s what we’re for. We get in there and we fix it.”

  Below us, the light went on in Emma’s room—our Fiona, keeping things interesting. It turned the curtains a soft translucent pink, lit the silhouettes of little animals prancing across the cloth. Richie nodded down at the window. He said, “We’re not going to fix that.”

  That morning in the morgue filled up his voice. “No,” I said. “That can’t be fixed. But at least we can make sure that the right people pay and the right people get a chance to move on. At least we can manage that much. I know we’re not saving the world. But we’re making it better.”

  “You believe that?”

  His upturned face, white and young in the moonlight: he so badly wanted me to be right. “Yeah,” I said. “I do. Maybe I’m naïve—I’ve been accused of that before, a couple of times—but I believe it. You’ll see what I mean. Wait till we get this guy. Wait till you go home that night and get into bed, knowing he’s behind bars and he’s going to stay there for three life sentences. See if the world you’re in then doesn’t feel like a better place than this one.”

  Our Fiona opened Emma’s curtains and gazed out into the garden, a slight dark silhouette against the pink wallpaper. Richie watched her. He said, “I hope.”

  The frail web of lights stretched across the estate had started to disintegrate, the bright threads of inhabited streets snapping into blackness. Richie rubbed his gloved hands together, blew into them. Our Fiona moved back and forth through the empty rooms, turning lights on and off, opening and closing curtains. The cold settled into the concrete of the hide, struck through the back of my coat into my spine.

  The night went on and on. A handful of times, a noise—a long slither through the undergrowth below us, a burst of scr
abbling and scuffling in the house across the road, a shrill wild squeal—had us on our feet and pressed back against walls, ready for action, before our minds understood that we had heard anything. Once the thermal goggles picked out a fox, luminous and poised in the road, head up, something small drooping from its mouth; another time they caught a sinuous streak of light whipping away through the gardens, between bricks and weeds. A few times we were too slow, caught nothing except the last rattle of pebbles, creepers swaying together, a vanishing flicker of white. Each time, it took longer before our heart rates eased to normal and we could sit down again. It was getting late. Our man was close by, tugged two ways and concentrating hard, deciding.

  “I forgot,” Richie said suddenly, after one o’clock. “I brought these.” He leaned over to his sports bag and pulled out a set of binoculars in a black plastic case.

  “Binoculars?” I held out my hand for them, opened the case to have a look. They looked low-end, and they weren’t from Supplies; the case still had that new-plastic smell. “Did you go out and buy those specially?”

  “They’re the same model our fella had,” Richie said, a touch sheepishly. “I figured we should have them too. See what he saw, yeah?”

  “Oh, Jesus. Tell me you’re not one of these touchy-feely types who get all into the idea of seeing through the killer’s eyes while they have a good rub of their intuition.”

  “No, I’m bleeding not. I meant literally. Like could he make out facial expressions, could he see anything on the computer—the names of the websites they were on, or whatever. That kind of thing.”

  Even in the moonlight I could see his fierce blush. It touched me: not just the idea of him spending his own money and time to track down the right binoculars, but how openly he cared what I thought. I said more gently, holding them out, “It’s a good idea. Have a look; you never know what might turn up.”