Tana French - Broken Harbour

“And that’s where you shut up. I don’t need the graphic details.” I didn’t; I could see exactly how it had gone down. It’s so, so lethally easy to get dragged into Dina’s crazy. One minute you’re only going to dip your toes at the edge, just so you can grab her hand and pull her out; the next minute you’re full fathom five and flailing for air.

“I’m only telling you. It just happened.”

“Your partner’s sister,” I said. Suddenly I was exhausted, exhausted and sick to my stomach, something rising and burning in my throat. I leaned my head back against the wall and pressed my fingers into my eyes. “Your partner’s crazy sister. How could that seem OK?”

Richie said quietly, “It doesn’t.”

The dark behind my fingers was deep and restful. I didn’t want to open my eyes on that harsh, biting light. “And when you woke up this morning,” I said, “Dina was gone, and so was the evidence bag. Where had it been?”

A moment’s silence. “On my bedside table.”

“In plain view of anyone who happened to wander in. Flatmates, burglars, one-night stands. Brilliant, old son.”

“My bedroom door locks. And during the day I kept it on me. In my jacket pocket.”

All those arguments we’d had, Conor versus Pat, half-real animals, old love stories: Richie’s side had been bullshit. He had been holding the answer the whole time, close enough that I could have reached out and put my hand on it. I said, “And didn’t that work out well?”

“I never thought of her taking it. She-”

“You weren’t thinking at all. Not by the time she got into your bedroom.”

“She was your mate -or I thought she was. I didn’t think about her robbing stuff, specially not that. She cared about you, like a lot; that was obvious. Why would she want to fuck up your case?”

“Oh, no, no. She wasn’t the one who fucked up this case.” I took my hands away from my face. Richie was scarlet. “She swiped this envelope because she changed her mind about you, chum. And she’s not the only one. Once she spotted this, it struck her that you might not be the wonderful, trustworthy, stand-up guy she’d been picturing, which meant you might not in fact be the best person to take care of me. So she figured her only option was to do it herself, by bringing me the evidence that my partner had decided to run off with. Two for one: I get my case back, and I get to find out the truth about who I’m dealing with. Seems to me that, crazy or no, she was on to something.”

Richie, focusing on his shoes, said nothing. I asked, “Were you ever planning to tell me?”

That snapped him straight. “Yeah, I was. When I first found that yoke, I was, practically definitely. That’s why I bagged it and tagged it. If I hadn’t been planning on telling you, I could’ve just flushed it down the jacks.”

“Well, congratulations, old son. What do you want, a medal?” I nodded towards the evidence envelope. I couldn’t look at it; in the corner of my eye it seemed crammed tight with something alive and raging, a great insect thrumming against the thin paper and plastic, straining to split the seams and attack. “‘Collected in sitting-room, residence of Conor Brennan.’ While I was outside, on the phone to Larry. Is that right?”

Richie stared at the papers in his hand, blankly, like he couldn’t remember what they were. He opened his hand and let them scatter on the floor. “Yeah,” he said.

“Where was it?”

“Must’ve been on the carpet. I was putting back all that stuff that had been on the sofa, and this was hanging off the sleeve of a jumper. It wasn’t there when we took the clothes off the sofa-we gave them all a proper going-over, remember, in case any of them had blood on. The jumper must’ve picked it up off the floor.”

I asked, “What color jumper?” I already knew I would remember if Conor Brennan’s wardrobe had included rose-pink knitwear.

“Green. Khaki, like.”

And the carpet had been cream, with dirty green and yellow swirls. Larry’s lads could go over the flat with magnifying glasses, looking for a match to that wisp of pink, and find nothing. I had known, the moment I saw that fingernail, where the match was.

I asked, “And how did you interpret this find?”

There was a silence. Richie was looking at nothing. I said, “Detective Curran.”

He said, “The fingernail-the shape and the polish-it matches Jenny Spain’s. The wool that’s caught in it-” A corner of his mouth spasmed. “Looked to me like it matched the embroidery on the pillow that smothered Emma.”

The sodden thread that Cooper had fished out of her throat, while he held her frail jaw open between thumb and finger. “And what did you take that to mean?”

Richie said, evenly and very quietly, “I took it to mean that Jennifer Spain could be our woman.”

“Not could be. Is.”

His shoulders moved restlessly, against the door. “It’s not definite. She could’ve picked up the wool some other way. Earlier on, when she put Emma to bed-”

“Jenny keeps herself groomed. Not a hair out of place. You think she’d have left a broken nail to snag on things all evening, gone to bed with it still ragged? Left a piece of wool caught in it for hours?”

“Or it could’ve been a transfer off Pat. He gets the bit of wool on his pajama top when he’s using the pillow on Emma; then, when he’s struggling with Jenny, she breaks a nail, the wool catches in it…”

“That one specific fiber, out of the thousands and thousands in his pajamas, on his pajamas, in her own pajamas, all over the kitchen. What are the odds?”

“It could happen. We can’t just drop the whole thing on Jenny. Cooper was positive, remember? Her injuries weren’t self-inflicted.”

“I know that,” I said. “I’ll talk to her.” The thought of having to deal with the world outside this room felt like a baton to the back of the knees. I sat down heavily at the table; I couldn’t stand up any more.

Richie had caught that: I’ll talk to her , not We . He opened his mouth and then shut it again, looking for the right question.

I said, “Why didn’t you tell me?” I heard the raw note of pain, but I didn’t care.

Richie’s eyes fell away from mine. He knelt on the floor and started picking up the papers he had dropped. He said, “Because I knew what you’d want to do.”

“What? Arrest Jenny? Not charge Conor with a triple murder he didn’t commit? What, Richie? What part of that is so fucking terrible that you just couldn’t let it happen?”

“Not terrible. Just… Arresting her: I don’t know, man. I’m not sure that’s the right thing to do here.”

“That’s what we do . We arrest murderers. If you have a problem with the job description, you should’ve got a different fucking job.”

That brought Richie up on his feet again. “That right there, that’s why I didn’t tell you. I knew that was what you’d say. I knew it. With you, man, everything’s black and white. No questions; just stick to the rules and go home. I needed to think about it because I knew the second I told you, it’d be too late.”

“Damn right it’s black and white. You slaughter your family, you go to prison. Where the fuck are you seeing shades of gray?”

“Jenny’s in hell. Every second of her life, she’s going to be in the kind of pain I don’t even want to think about. You think prison’s going to punish her any worse than her own head? There’s nothing she can do, or we can do, to fix what she did, and it’s not like we need to lock her up to stop her doing it again. What’s a life sentence going to do here?”

Here I had thought it was Richie’s knack, his special gift: coaxing witnesses and suspects into believing, absurd and impossible though it was, that he saw them as human beings. I had been so impressed by the way he convinced the Gogans they were more than random irritating scumbags to him, the way he convinced Conor Brennan he was more than just another wild animal we needed to get off the street. I should have known, that night in the hide when we became just two guys talking, I should have known then and I should have seen the danger: it wasn’t an act.