Ryan - 04 - Broken Harbour Page 23

  No cuts or bruises that I could see, but anything could be hidden under all those clothes. I turned the interview-room thermostat up higher.

  It felt good, seeing him in that room. Most of our interview rooms could do with a shower, a shave and a full makeover, but I love every inch of them. Our territory fights on our side. In Broken Harbor he had been a shadow that moved through walls, an iodine scent of blood and seawater, with shards of moonlight stuck in his eyes. Now he was just a guy. They all are, once you get them between those four walls.

  He sat hunched rigidly in the uncomfortable chair, staring down at his fists on the table like he was bracing himself for torture. He hadn’t even glanced around the room—linoleum pocked with old cigarette burns and lumps of chewing gum, walls scored with graffiti, bolted-down table and filing cabinet, the video camera’s dull red light watching him from a high corner—to get his bearings. I said, “What do we know about him?”

  Richie was watching so intently that his nose was practically touching the glass. “He’s not on anything. At first I was thinking he could be on the gear, ’cause he’s so skinny, but no.”

  “Not right now, anyway. That’s good for us: if we get anything, we don’t want him saying it was the drugs talking. What else?”

  “Loner. Nocturnal.”

  “Right. Everything says he’s more comfortable keeping his distance from other people, rather than making close contact—he got his kicks by watching, broke in when the Spains were out rather than when they were asleep. So when it comes time to push him, we want to get in close, get in his face, both of us at once. And since he’s nocturnal, we want the push to come towards dawn, when he’s starting to fade. Anything else?”

  “No wedding ring. More than likely he lives alone: no one to notice when he’s out all night, ask him what he’s at.”

  “Which would have its upside and its downside, as far as we’re concerned. No flatmate to testify that he got in at six on Tuesday morning and ran the washing machine for four hours straight, but on the other hand, no one for him to bother hiding things from. When we find his gaff, there’s a chance he’ll have left us a little present—the bloodstained clothes, that honeymoon pen. Maybe a trophy he took the other night.”

  The guy stirred, groped at his face, rubbed clumsily at his mouth. His lips were swollen and cracked, like he had gone a long time without water.

  Richie said, “He’s not working a nine-to-five. He could be unemployed, or self-employed, or maybe he does shift work or a part-time gig—something that means he can spend the night up in that nest when he wants to, without banjaxing himself for work the next day. Just going by the clothes, I’d say middle-class.”

  “So would I. And he’s never been in the system before—his prints came up clean, remember. He probably doesn’t even know anyone who’s ever been in the system. He’s got to be disoriented and scared. That’s good stuff, but we want to save it for when we need it. We want to get him as relaxed as we can, see how far that takes us, then scare the living shite out of him when it comes to the big push. The good thing is, he won’t walk out on us before then. Middle-class guy, probably got respect for authority, doesn’t know the system . . . He’ll stay till we kick him out.”

  “Yeah. Probably he will.” Richie was drawing absent, abstract patterns in the mist his breath had left on the glass. “And that’s all I can figure out about him. You know that? This fella’s organized enough to set up that nest, disorganized enough that he doesn’t even bother taking it down again. Clever enough to get himself into that house, thick enough to take the weapons away with him. He’s got enough self-control that he waited for months, but he can’t even wait two nights after the murder before he’s back up to his hide—and he must’ve known we’d be on the lookout, must’ve done. I can’t get a handle on him.”

  On top of all that, the guy looked much too frail to have done this. I wasn’t fooled. Plenty of the most brutal predators I’ve caught looked soft as kittens, and they’re always at their tamest just after the kill, spent and sated. I said, “He’s got no more self-control than a baboon. None of them do. We’ve all wanted to kill someone, at some point in our lives—don’t tell me you haven’t. What makes these guys different from us is that they don’t stop themselves from actually doing it. Scratch the surface and they’re animals: screaming, shit-flinging, throat-ripping animals. That’s what we deal with. Never forget that.”

  Richie didn’t look convinced. I said, “You think I’m being hard on them? Society’s given them a raw deal, and I should have a little more empathy?”

  “Not exactly. Just . . . if he’s got no control, then how’d he manage to hold back for so long?”

  I said, “He didn’t. We’re missing something.”

  “How d’you mean?”

  “Like you said, this guy spent at least a few months, probably more, just watching the Spains, maybe occasionally sneaking into the house when they weren’t around. That wasn’t his amazing self-control in action: it was because that was all he needed to get his fix. And then, all of a sudden, he comes charging out of his comfort zone: jumps from binoculars straight to full-on close contact. That didn’t come out of nowhere. Something happened, in this last week or so; something big. We’ll need to find out what that was.”

  In the interview room, our man knuckled his eyes, stared at his hands like he was looking for blood, or tears. “And I’ll tell you one more thing,” I said. “He feels very emotionally connected to the Spains.”

  Richie stopped drawing. “You think? I was thinking it wasn’t personal. The way he kept his distance . . .”

  “No. If he were a professional, he’d be home by now: he’d have clocked that he’s not under arrest, and he’d never even have got into our car. And he isn’t a sociopath who saw them as just random objects that looked like fun, either. The soft kill on the kids, the close-contact kill on the adults, wrecking Jenny’s face . . . He had feelings for them. He thinks he was close to them. More than likely the only actual interaction they ever had was when Jenny smiled at him in the queue at Tesco; but in his head, at least, there was a connection there.”

  Richie breathed on the glass again and went back to his patterns, more slowly this time. “You’re taking it as a definite that he’s our man,” he said. “Yeah?”

  I said, “It’s early days to call anything definite.” There was no way to tell him that the drumming in my ears had swelled so high, in the car with this man at my shoulder, I had almost been afraid I would have us off the road. The man permeated the air around him with wrongness, strong and repellent as naphtha, as if he had been soaked in it. “But if you’re asking for my personal opinion, then yes. Hell yes. This is our man.”

  The guy raised his head as if he had heard me, and his eyes, rimmed with painful-looking swells of red, skidded around the room. For a second they rested on the one-way glass. Maybe he watched enough cop shows to know what it was; maybe the thing that had fluttered through my skull in the car moved both ways, shrilled like a bat at the back of his neck to warn him I was there. For the first time, his eyes focused, like they were staring straight into mine. He took a quick deep breath and set his jaw, ready.

  The tips of my fingers were prickling with how much I wanted to get in there. “We’ll let him wonder for another fifteen minutes,” I said. “Then you go in.”

  “Just me?”

  “He’ll see you as less of a threat than me. Nearer his age.” And there was the class gap, too: a nice middle-class boy could easily discount an inner-city kid like Richie as some idiot skanger. The lads would have been gobsmacked if they had seen me letting a brand-new newbie loose on this interrogation, but Richie wasn’t quite your ordinary rookie, and this felt like a two-man job. “Just settle him, Richie. That’s all. Find out his name, if you can. Get him a cup of tea. Don’t go anywhere near the case, and for the love of all that’s holy do
n’t let him ask for a lawyer. I’ll give you a few minutes with him, and then I’ll come in. OK?”

  Richie nodded. He said, “You think we’ll get a confession out of him?”

  Most of them never confess. You can show them their prints all over the weapon, the victim’s blood all over their clothes and CCTV footage of them whacking her over the head, and they’ll still be spewing out injured innocence and howling about frame-ups. In nine people out of ten, self-preservation goes deeper than sense, deeper than thought. You pray to get the tenth person, the one built with a crack in the self-preservation where something else runs deeper still—the need to be understood, the need to please you, sometimes even conscience. You pray for the one who, somewhere darker than the inside of bone, doesn’t want to save himself; for the one who stands at the top of the cliff and has to fight the urge to leap. Then you find that crack, and you press.

  I said, “That’s what we’re aiming for. The Super comes in at nine; that gives us six hours. Let’s have this ready to hand over to him, all wrapped up and tied with a bow.”

  Richie nodded again. He pulled off his jacket and three heavy jumpers and dropped them on a chair, leaving him narrow and gangly as a teenager in a long-sleeved navy T-shirt that had been washed thin. He stood at the glass, no fidgeting, and watched the guy hunch lower over the table until I checked my watch and said, “Go.” Then he ran a hand through his hair so it stood up on end, got two cups of water from the cooler, and went.

  He did it nicely. He went in holding out a cup and saying, “Sorry, man, I meant to bring this in to you before, only I got caught up . . . Is that all right for you? Would you have a cup of tea instead, yeah?” His accent had got thicker. The class thing had occurred to him, too.

  Our man had jumped half out of his skin when the door opened, and he was still catching his breath. He shook his head.

  Richie hovered, looking fifteen. “You sure? Coffee?”

  Another head-shake.

  “Grand. You’ll let me know if you need more of this, yeah?”

  The guy nodded and reached for the water. The chair rocked under his weight. “Ah, hang on,” Richie said. “He’s after giving you the dud chair.” Quick surreptitious glance at the door, like I might be behind it. “Go on: swap over. Have this one.”

  Our man shuffled awkwardly across. Probably it made no difference—all the chairs in the interview rooms are chosen to be uncomfortable—but he said, so low I barely heard him, “Thanks.”

  “No problem. Detective Richie Curran.” He held out a hand.

  Our man didn’t take it. He said, “Do I have to tell you my name?” His voice was low and even, good to listen to, with a slight rough edge like it hadn’t got much use lately. The accent gave me nothing; he could have been from anywhere.

  Richie looked surprised. “Do you not want to? Why not?”

  After a moment he said, to himself, “. . . make any difference . . .” To Richie, with a mechanical handshake: “Conor.”

  “Conor what?”

  A fraction of a second. “Doyle.” It wasn’t, but that didn’t matter. Come morning we would find either his house or his car, or both, and strip them to the bones looking for, among other things, his ID. All we needed for now was something to call him.

  “Nice to meet you, Mr. Doyle. Detective Kennedy’ll be here in a while, then yous can get started.” Richie balanced the edge of his arse on a corner of the table. “I’ll tell you now, I’m only delighted you showed up. I was dying to get out of there, I was. I know people pay good money to go camping up by the sea and all, but the countryside isn’t my style, know what I mean?”

  Conor shrugged, a small, jerky movement. “It’s peaceful.”

  “I’m not mad about peaceful. City boy, me; give me the noise and the traffic any day. And I was freezing my bollix off, as well. Are you from up there, are you?”

  Conor glanced up sharply, but Richie was slugging at his water and watching the door, just making small talk while he waited for me. Conor said, “No one’s from Brianstown. They just move there.”

  “That’s what I meant: are you living there, yeah? Jaysus, you couldn’t pay me enough.”

  He waited, all mild innocuous curiosity, till Conor said, “No. Dublin.”

  Not local. Richie had knocked out one angle and saved us a lot of hassle right there. He raised his cup in a cheerful toast. “Up the Dubs. No better place. And wild horses couldn’t drag us away, amn’t I right?”

  Another shrug. “I’d live down the country. Depending.”

  Richie hooked an ankle around a spare chair and pulled it over for his feet, getting comfortable for an interesting chat. “Would you, seriously? Depending on what?”

  Conor wiped a palm up his jaw, hard, trying to pull it together: Richie was nudging him off balance, poking little holes in his concentration. “Dunno. If you had a family. Space for the kids to play.”

  “Ah,” Richie said, pointing a finger at him. “There you go, see. I’m a single man: I need somewhere I can get a few drinks in, meet a few girls. Can’t live without that, know what I mean?”

  I had been right to send him in. He was relaxed as a sunbather and doing a beautiful job. I was willing to bet that Conor had gone into that room with the intention of keeping his lip firmly zipped, for years if necessary. Every detective, even Quigley, has knacks, little things that he does better than anyone else around: we all know who to call if we want a witness reassured by the expert, or a quick bit of intimidation done right. Richie had one of the rarest knacks of all. He could make a witness believe, against all the evidence, that they were just two people talking, the same way the two of us had talked while we waited in that hide; that Richie was seeing not a solve in the making, not a bad guy who needed locking up for the good of society, but another human being. It was good to know.

  Conor said, “That gets old, the going out. You stop wanting it.”

  Richie’s hands went up. “Take your word for that, man. What do you start wanting instead?”

  “Something to come home to. A wife. Kids. A bit of peace. The simple stuff.”

  It moved through his voice, slow and heavy, like a shadow looming under dark water: grief. For the first time, I felt a flick of empathy for the guy. The disgust that came with it almost shot me into the interview room to get to work on him.

  Richie held up crossed index fingers. “Sooner you than me,” he said cheerfully.

  “Wait.”

  “I’m twenty-three. Long while to go before the biological clock kicks in.”

  “Wait. Nightclubs, all the girls made up to look exactly like each other, everyone pissed off their heads so they can act like someone they’re not. After a while, it’ll make you sick.”

  “Ah. Got burned, yeah? Brought home a babe and woke up with a hound?”

  Richie was grinning. Conor said, “Maybe. Something like that.”

  “Been there, man. The beer goggles are a bastard. So where do you go looking for chicks, if the clubs don’t do it for you?”

  Shrug. “I don’t go out much.”

  He was starting to turn his shoulder to Richie, block him out: time to change things up. I went for the interview room with a bang: sweeping the door open, spinning a chair over to face Conor—Richie slid off the table and into a chair next to me, fast—throwing myself back in it, shooting my cuffs. “Conor,” I said. “I don’t know about you, but I’d love to get this sorted out fast enough that we can all get some sleep tonight. What do you say?”

  Before he could come up with an answer, I held up a hand. “Whoa, hang on there, Speedy Gonzalez. I’m sure you’ve got plenty to say, but you’ll get your turn. Let me share a few things with you first.” They need to be taught that you own them now; that from this moment on, you’re the one who decides when they talk, drink, smoke, sleep, piss. “I’m Detective Ke
nnedy, this is Detective Curran, and you’re just here to answer some questions for us. You’re not under arrest, nothing like that, but we need a chat. I’m pretty sure you know what all this is about.”

  Conor shook his head, one heavy shake. He was dropping back towards that weighted silence, but I was fine with that, for the moment anyway.

  “Ah, man,” Richie said reproachfully. “Come on. What d’you think it’s about? The Great Train Robbery?”

  No response. “Leave the man alone, Detective Curran. He’s only doing what he was told, aren’t you, Conor? Wait your turn, I said, and that’s what he’s doing. I like that. It’s good to have the ground rules clear.” I steepled my fingers on the table and examined them thoughtfully. “Now, Conor, I’m sure spending your night like this doesn’t make you a happy man. I can see your point there. But if you look at this properly, if you really look at it, this is your lucky night.”

  He shot me a look of pure jagged incredulity.

  “It’s true, my friend. You know and we know that you shouldn’t have been setting up camp in that house, because it’s not yours, now is it?”

  Nothing. “Or maybe I’m wrong,” I said, with the corner of a grin. “Maybe if we check with the developers, they’ll tell us you put down a nice big chunk of deposit, will they? Do I owe you an apology, fella? Are you on that property ladder after all?”

  “No.”

  I clicked my tongue and wagged a finger at him. “I didn’t think so. Naughty, naughty: just because no one’s living there, son, that doesn’t mean you get to move in, bag and baggage. That’s still breaking and entering, you know. The law doesn’t take a day off just because you fancy a holiday home and no one else was using it.”

  I was piling on the patronizing as thick as I could, and it was needling Conor out of his silence. “I didn’t break anything. Just walked in.”

  “Why don’t we let the lawyers explain why that’s beside the point? If things go that far, of course, which”—I raised a finger—“they don’t need to. Because like I said, Conor, you’re a very lucky young man. Detective Curran and I aren’t actually that interested in a pissant B and E charge—not tonight. Let’s put it this way: when a couple of hunters go out for the night, they’re looking for big game. If a rabbit, say, is all they can find, they’ll take that; but if the rabbit puts them on the trail of a grizzly bear, they’re going to let the bunny hop along home while they go chasing the grizzly. Are you following me?”