Tana French - Broken Harbour

Sigh. “You understand this is provisional. I could be wrong.”

“Understood.”

“OK. Basically, she was lucky to make it this far. She has four abdominal injuries that look like knife wounds to me, but that’s for your doctor to decide. Two of them are deep, but they must have missed all the major organs and arteries, or she’d have bled out before she got here. There’s another injury to her right cheek, looks like a knife slash, straight through into the mouth-if she makes it, she’ll need considerable amounts of plastic surgery. There’s also some kind of blunt trauma to the back of the skull. X-ray showed a hairline fracture and a subdural hematoma, but judging by her reflexes there’s a decent chance she’s escaped without brain damage. Again, she was very lucky.”

Which was probably the last time anyone would ever use that word about Jennifer Spain. “Anything else?”

I could hear him swigging something, probably coffee, and swallowing a huge yawn. “Sorry. There could be minor injuries-I wasn’t looking for anything like that, my priority was getting her into surgery before we lost her, and the blood could have covered some cuts and contusions. There’s nothing else major, though.”

“Any signs of sexual assault?”

“Like I said, that wasn’t top priority. For what it’s worth, I didn’t see anything that would point that way.”

“What was she wearing?”

An instant of silence, while he wondered whether he had got it wrong and I was some specialized kind of pervert. “Yellow pajamas. Nothing else.”

“There should be an officer at the hospital. I’d like you to put her pajamas in a paper bag and hand them over to him. Make a note of anyone who touched them, if you can.” I had chalked up two more points for Jennifer Spain being a victim. Women don’t wreck their faces, and they sure as hell don’t go in their pajamas. They put on their best dresses, take time over their mascara and pick a method that they believe-and they’re almost always wrong-will leave them quiet and graceful, all the pain washed away and nothing left but cool pale peace. Somewhere in what’s left of their crumbling minds, they think that being found looking less than their best will upset them. Most suicides don’t really believe that death is all the way. Maybe none of us do.

“We gave him the pajamas. I’ll make the list as soon as I get a chance.”

“Did she recover consciousness at any stage?”

“No. Like I said, there’s a fair chance she never will. We’ll know more after the surgery.”

“If she makes it, when do you think we’d be able to talk to her?”

Sigh. “Your guess is as good as mine. With head wounds, nothing’s predictable.”

“Thanks, Doctor. Can you let me know straightaway if anything changes?”

“I’ll do my best. If you’ll excuse me, I have to-”

And he was gone. I put in a quick call to Bernadette, the squad admin, to let her know that I needed someone to get started on pulling the Spains’ financials and phone records, and put a rush on it. I was hanging up when my phone buzzed: three new voice messages, from calls that hadn’t got through the shitty reception. O’Kelly, letting me know he had wangled me a couple of extra floaters; a journalist contact, begging for a scoop he wasn’t going to get this time; and Geri. Only patches of the voice mail came through: “… can’t, Mick… sick every five minutes… can’t leave the house, even for… everything OK? Give me a ring when…”

“ Shit ,” I said, before I could bite it back. Dina works in town, in a deli. I tried to calculate how many hours it would be before I got anywhere near town again, and what the odds were of her making it that long without someone switching on a radio.

Richie cocked his head, questioning. “Nothing,” I said. There was no point in ringing Dina-she hates phones-and there was no one else to ring. I took a fast breath and tamped it down at the back of my mind. “Let’s go. We’ve kept the Bureau boys waiting long enough.”

Richie nodded. I put my phone away, and we headed up to the top of the road to talk to the men in white.

The Super had come through for me: he had got the Tech Bureau to send out Larry Boyle, with a photographer and a scene mapper and a couple of others in tow. Boyle is a round, pancake-faced little oddball who gives you the impression that he has a room at home packed with disturbing magazines, neatly alphabetized, but he runs a scene impeccably and he’s the best we’ve got on blood spatter. I was going to need both of those.

“Well, about time ,” he told me. He was already in his white hooded boiler suit, with his gloves and overshoes hanging ready from one hand. “Who’s this we’ve got here?”

“My new partner, Richie Curran. Richie, this is Larry Boyle from the Bureau. Be nice to him. We like him.”

“Stop that carry-on till we see if I’m any use to you,” Larry said, batting a hand at me. “What’s in there?”

“Father and two kids, dead. The mother’s gone to hospital. The kids were upstairs and it looks like suffocation, the adults were downstairs and it looks like stabbing. We’ve got enough blood spatter to keep you happy for weeks.”

“Oh, lovely.”

“Don’t say I never did anything for you. Apart from the usual, I’m looking for whatever you can tell me about the progression of events-who was attacked first, where, how much moving around they did afterwards, what the struggle might have looked like. As far as we could see, there’s no blood upstairs, which could be significant. Can you check for us?”

“No problem to me. Any more special requests?”

I said, “There was something very weird going on in that house, and I’m talking about well before last night. We’ve got a bunch of holes in the walls, and no clue who made them or why-if you can find us any indications, fingerprints or anything, we’d be very grateful. We’ve also got a load of baby monitors-at least two audio and five video, going by the chargers on the bedside table, but there could be more. We’re not sure what they were for yet, and we’ve only located three of the cameras: upstairs landing, sitting-room side table, kitchen floor. I’d like photos of all of them in situ. And we need to find the other two cameras, or however many there are. Same for the viewers: we’ve got two charging, two on the kitchen floor, so we’re short at least one.”

“Mmm,” Larry said, with relish. “ In -teresting. Thank God for you, Scorcher. One more bedsit overdose and I think I’d have died of boredom.”

“I’m thinking we could have a drug connection here, actually. Nothing definite, but I’d love to know if there are drugs in that house, or if there used to be.”

“Oh, God, not drugs again . We’ll swab anything that looks promising, but I’ll be only delighted if it turns up negative.”

“I need their mobiles, I need any financial paperwork you run across, and there’s a computer in the kitchen that’ll need going over. And give the attic a good once-over for me, will you? We haven’t been up there, but whatever was weird, it involved the attic somehow. You’ll see what I mean.”

“Now that’s more like it,” Larry said happily. “I love a bit of weird. Shall we?”

I said, “That’s the injured woman’s sister, in the uniforms’ car. We’re about to go have a chat with her. Can you hold off another minute, until we’ve got her out of view? I don’t want her seeing you guys heading in, just in case she loses the plot.”

“I have that effect on women. Not a bother; we’ll hang on here till you give us the nod. Have fun, boys.” He waved us good-bye with his overshoes.

Richie said grimly, as we headed back down the road towards the sister, “He won’t be so cheerful once he’s been inside that house.”