Tana French - Broken Harbour

“But Pat was all, ‘No, listen, you don’t understand.’ He said he’d already tried an exterminator, but the guy told him whatever we had was way out of his league. I was like, ‘Oh my God , Pat, and you just let us keep living here? Are you insane?’ He looked at me like a little kid who’s brought you his new drawing and you threw it in the bin. He went, ‘You think I’d let you and the kids stay if it wasn’t safe? I’m on it. We don’t need some exterminator guy messing around with poison and charging us a few grand. I’m going to get this thing.’”

Jenny shook her head. “I was like, ‘Um, hello? So far you haven’t even managed to get a look at it,’ and he went, ‘Well, yeah, but that’s because I couldn’t do anything that might tip you off. Now that you know, there’s all kinds of stuff I can do. God, Jen, this is such a massive relief!’

“He was laughing: flopped back in his chair, rubbing his head so his hair went all messy, and laughing. Personally I didn’t exactly see anything to laugh about, but still…” Something that might have been a smile, if it had been less crammed with sadness. “It was nice to see him like that, you know? Really nice. So I went, ‘What kind of stuff?’

“Pat leaned his elbows on the desk, all settled in like when we used to plan out a holiday or something, and he went, ‘Well, the monitor in the attic obviously isn’t working, right? The animal’s dodging it-maybe it doesn’t like the infrared, I don’t know. So what we have to do is think like the animal. See what I mean?’

“I went, ‘Totally not,’ and he laughed again. He went, ‘OK, what does it want ? We’re not sure-could be food, warmth, even company. But whatever it is, the animal thinks it’s going to find it in this house, or it wouldn’t be here, right? It wants something that it thinks it’s going to get from us . So we have to give it the chance to get closer.’

“I was like, ‘Oh hell no ,’ but Pat went, ‘No no no, don’t worry, not that close! I’m talking about a controlled chance. We control it, all the way. I rig up a monitor on the landing, pointing at the attic hatch, right? I leave the hatch open, but with wire mesh nailed over it, so the animal can’t get down into the house. We’ll keep the landing light on, so there’ll be enough light that I won’t need to use the infrared, in case that’s what’s scaring it away. And then we just have to wait. Sooner or later, it’s going to get tempted, it’s going to need to get closer to us, it’s going to head for the hatch-and boom-boom, caught on camera. See? It’s perfect!’”

Jenny’s palms turned up helplessly. “It didn’t exactly sound perfect to me. But, I mean… I’m supposed to support my husband, right? And like I said, this was the happiest he’d looked in months. So I went, ‘OK, fine. Off you go.’”

This story should have been gibberish, incoherent fragments gasped out between sobs. Instead, it was crystal clear. She was telling it with the same relentless, iron-willed precision that had forced her house to perfection every night, before she could sleep. Maybe I should have admired her control, or at least been grateful for it: I had thought, before that first interview, that Jenny dissolved in howling grief was my worst nightmare. This flat still voice, like a disembodied thing waking you deep in the night to whisper on and on in your ear, was much worse.

I said-I had to clear my throat before the words would come out-“When was this conversation?”

“Like the end of July? God-” I saw her swallow. “Less than three months. I can’t believe… It feels like three years .”

The end of July tallied with Pat’s discussion-board posts. I said, “Did you assume that the animal existed? Or did it occur to you, even just as a possibility, that your husband might be imagining it?”

Jenny said, sharply and instantly, “Pat’s not crazy.”

“I’ve never thought he was. But you’ve just told me he was under a lot of stress. In the circumstances, anyone’s imagination could get a little overactive.”

Jenny stirred restlessly. She said, “I don’t know. Maybe I wondered, sort of. I mean, I’d never heard anything, so…” A shrug. “But I didn’t even really care. All I cared about was getting back to normal. I figured once Pat put up the camera, things would get better. Either he’d get a look at this animal or he’d work out it wasn’t there-because it had gone somewhere else, or because it was never there to start with. And either way, he’d feel better because he was doing something and because he was talking to me, right? I still think that makes sense. That wasn’t a crazy thing to think, was it? Anyone would’ve thought that. Right?”

Her eyes were on me, huge with pleading. “That’s exactly what I would have thought,” I said. “But that’s not what happened?”

“Things got worse . Pat still didn’t see anything, but instead of just giving up, he decided the animal knew the monitor was there. I was like, ‘OK, hello, how ?’ He was like, ‘Whatever it is, it’s not stupid. It’s very far from stupid.’ He said he kept hearing the scratching in the sitting room, when he was watching telly, so he figured the animal had got scared by the camera and worked its way into the walls . He was like, ‘That hatch is way too exposed. I don’t have a clue what I was thinking; no wild animal’s going to come out into the open like that. Of course it’s moved into the walls. What I really need to do is get a camera pointed inside the sitting-room wall.’

“I went, ‘No. No way,’ but Pat went, ‘Ah, come on, Jen, we’re only talking about a tiny little hole. I’ll put it out of sight, in by the sofa; you won’t even know it’s there. Just for a few days, maybe a week tops; just till we get a look at this thing. If we don’t sort it now, the animal could get stuck inside the walls and die there, and then I’d have to rip up half the place to get it out. You don’t want that, do you?’”

Jenny’s fingers tugged at the hem of the bedsheet, pleating it into little folds. “To be honest, I wasn’t all that worried about that. Maybe you’re right: maybe deep down I thought there was nothing there. But just in case… And it meant so much to him. So I said OK.” Her fingers were moving faster. “Maybe that was my mistake; that was where I went wrong. Maybe if I’d put my foot down right then, he’d have forgotten about it. Do you think?”

It felt like something scalding into my skin, that desperate plea, like something I would never be able to scrape off. I said, “I doubt he would have forgotten about it.”

“You think? You don’t think if I’d just said no, everything would have been OK?”

I couldn’t bear her eyes. I said, “So Pat made a hole in the wall?”

“Yeah. Our lovely house, that we’d worked like crazy to buy and keep nice, that we used to love , and now he was smashing it to pieces. I wanted to cry. Pat saw my face and he went, really grim , ‘What’s it matter? A couple more months and it’ll be the bank’s anyway.’ He’d never said anything like that before. Before, we’d both always been all, ‘We’ll find a way, it’ll be OK…’ And the look on his face… There was nothing I could say. I just turned around and walked out and left him there, hammering the wall. It fell apart like it was made out of nothing.”

I checked my watch again, out of the corner of my eye. For all I knew Fiona already had her ear pressed to the door, trying to work out whether to burst in. I shifted my chair even closer to Jenny-it made the hair at the top of my head lift-so she wouldn’t raise her voice.