Tana French - Broken Harbour

My breath on her cheek made her lashes flicker. “A cat.”

That was what I had thought. I couldn’t believe I had ever seen it like that, as some soft, harmless thing. “You don’t have a cat. Neither do any of your neighbors.”

“Emma wanted one. So she drew one.”

“That doesn’t look like a cuddly house pet to me. That looks like a wild animal. Something savage. Not something any little girl would want snuggled up on her bed. What is it, Mrs. Spain? Mink? Wolverine? What?”

“I don’t know. Something Emma made up. What does it matter?”

“It matters because, from everything I’ve heard about Emma, she liked pretty things. Soft, fluffy, pink things. So where did she come up with something like this?”

“I don’t have a clue. School, maybe. On the telly.”

“No, Mrs. Spain. She found this at home.”

“No she didn’t . I wouldn’t let my kids near some wild animal. Go ahead: look through our house. You won’t find anything like that.”

I said, “I’ve already found it. Did you know Pat was posting to internet discussion boards?”

Jenny’s head whipped around so fast I flinched. She stared at me, eyes frozen wide. “No he wasn’t.”

“We’ve found his posts.”

“No you haven’t. It’s the internet; anyone can say they’re anyone. Pat didn’t go online. Only to e-mail his brother and look for jobs.”

She had started shaking, a tiny unstoppable tremor that juddered her head and her hands. I said, “We found the posts via your home computer, Mrs. Spain. Someone tried to delete the internet history, but he didn’t do a very good job: it took our lads no time to get the info back. For months before he died, Pat was looking for ways to catch, or at least identify, the predator living inside his walls.”

“That was a joke. He was bored, he had time on his hands-he was messing about, just to see what people online would say. That’s all.”

“And the wolf trap in your attic? The holes in your walls? The video monitors? Were those jokes too?”

“I don’t know. I don’t remember. The holes in the walls just happened, those houses are built from crap, they’re all falling to bits-the monitors, those were just Pat and the kids playing, just to see if-”

“Mrs. Spain,” I said, “listen to me. We’re the only ones here. I’m not recording anything. I haven’t cautioned you. Anything you say can never be used as evidence.”

Plenty of detectives take this gamble on a regular basis, betting that if the suspect talks once, the second time will come easier, or that the unusable confession will point them towards something they can use. I don’t like gambles, but I had nothing and no time to lose. Jenny was never going to give me a confession under caution, not in a hundred years. I had nothing to offer her that she wanted more than the sweet cold of razor blades, the cleansing fire of ant poison, the calling sea, and nothing to brandish that was more terrifying than the thought of sixty years on this earth.

If her mind had held even the smallest chance of a future, she would have had no reason to tell me anything at all, whether or not it could send her to prison. But this is what I know about people getting ready to walk off the edges of their own lives: they want someone to know how they got there. Maybe they want to know that when they dissolve into earth and water, that last fragment will be saved, held in some corner of someone’s mind; or maybe all they want is a chance to dump it pulsing and bloody into someone else’s hands, so it won’t weigh them down on the journey. They want to leave their stories behind. No one in all the world knows that better than I do.

That was the one thing I had to offer Jenny Spain: a place to put her story. I would have sat there while that blue sky dimmed into night, sat there while over the hills in Broken Harbor the grinning jack-o’-lanterns faded and the Christmas lights started to flash out their defiant celebrations, if that was how long it took her to tell me. As long as she was talking, she was alive.

Silence, while Jenny let that move around her mind. The shaking had stopped. Slowly her hands uncurled from the soft sleeves and reached out for the drawing on her lap; her fingers moved like a blind woman’s over the four yellow heads, the four smiles, the block-lettered EMMA in the bottom corner.

She said, just a thin thread of whisper trickling through the still air, “It was getting out.”

Slowly, so as not to spook her, I leaned back in my chair and gave her room. It was only when I moved back that I realized how hard I had been trying not to breathe the air around her, and how light-headed it had left me. “Let’s go from the beginning,” I said. “How did it start?”

Jenny’s head moved on the pillow, heavily, from side to side. “If I knew that, I could’ve stopped it. I’ve been lying here just thinking and thinking, but I can’t put my finger on it.”

“When did you first notice that something was bothering Pat?”

“Way back. Ages ago. May? The start of June? I’d say something to him and he wouldn’t answer; when I looked at him, he’d be there staring into space, like he was listening for something. Or the kids would start making noise, and Pat would whip round and go, ‘Shut up!’-and when I asked him what the problem was, because that totally wasn’t like him, he’d be like, ‘Nothing, just I should be able to get some bloody peace and quiet in my own home, that’s the only problem.’ It was just tiny stuff-no one else would have even noticed-and he said he was fine, but I knew Pat. I knew him inside out. I knew there was something wrong.”

I said, “But you didn’t know what it was.”

“How would I have known?” Jenny’s voice had a sudden defensive edge. “He’d said a few times about hearing scratching noises up in the attic, but I never heard anything. I thought probably it was a bird going in and out. I didn’t think it was a big deal-like, why would it be? I figured Pat was depressed about being out of work.”

Meanwhile, Pat had slowly turned more and more afraid that she thought he was hearing things. He had taken it for granted that the animal was preying on her mind too. I said, “Unemployment had been getting to him?”

“Yeah. A lot. We were…” Jenny shifted restlessly in the bed, caught her breath sharply as some wound pulled. “We’d been having problems about that. We never used to fight, ever. But Pat loved providing for all of us-he was over the moon when I quit working, he was so proud that he could afford for me to do that. When he lost his job… At first he was all positive, all, ‘Don’t worry, babes, I’ll have something else before you know it, you go buy that new top you were wanting and don’t worry for one second.’ I thought he’d get something, too-I mean, he’s good at what he does, he works like mad, of course he would, right?”

She was still shifting, running a hand through her hair, tugging harder and harder at tangles. “That’s how it works . Everyone knows: if you don’t have a job, it’s because you’re crap at what you do, or because you don’t actually want one. End of story.”

I said, “There’s a recession on. During a recession, there are exceptions to most rules.”

“It just made sense that he’d find something, you know? But things don’t make sense any more. It didn’t matter what Pat deserved: there just weren’t any jobs out there. By the time that started hitting us, though, we were pretty much broke.”

The word sent a hot, raw red creeping up her neck. I said, “And that was putting a strain on you both.”

“Yeah. Having no money… it’s awful . I said that to Fiona once, but she didn’t get it. She was all, ‘So what? Sooner or later, one of you’ll get another job. Till then, you’re not starving, you’ve got plenty of clothes, the kids don’t even know the difference. You’ll be fine.’ I mean, maybe to her and her arty friends, money isn’t a big deal, but to most of us out here in the real world, it actually does make a difference. To actual real things.”