Tana French - Broken Harbour

“It does, yeah. Tell us something: have you had any hassle with mice, rats, anything like that?”

That got Jayden’s attention. He even hit Pause. “Jesus! Did rats eat them?”

“No,” I said.

“Ahhh,” he said, disappointed, but he kept watching us. The kid was unnerving. He had flat, colorless eyes, like a squid.

His mother said, “Never had rats. I wouldn’t be surprised, the way the drains are in this place, but no. Not yet, anyway.”

Richie said, “It isn’t great out here, no?”

“It’s a dump,” Jayden said.

“Yeah? Why?”

He shrugged. Sinéad said, “Have you looked at the place?”

“Looks all right to me,” Richie said, surprised. “Nice houses, loads of space, you’ve done the place up lovely…”

“Yeah, that’s what we thought. Looked great on the plans. Hang on-”

She heaved herself out of the chair with a grunt and bent over-I could have lived without that view-to paw through the mess on a side table: celebrity magazines, spilled sugar, a baby monitor, half a sausage roll on a greasy plate. “Here,” she said, shoving a brochure at Richie. “That’s what we thought we were buying.”

The front of the brochure said OCEAN VIEW, in the same curly writing as the signboard outside the estate, over a photo of a laughing couple hugging two catalog kids in front of a snow-white house and Mediterranean-blue waves. Inside was the menu: four-bed, five-bed, detached, duplex, whatever your heart desired, all of them so pristine they almost glowed and so well Photoshopped you could barely tell they were scale models. The houses had names: the Diamond was a five-bed detached with garage, the Topaz was a two-bed duplex, the Emerald and the Pearl and the rest were somewhere in between-it looked like we were in the Sapphire. More curly lettering cooed breathlessly about the beach, the childcare facility, the leisure center, a corner shop, a playground, “a self-contained haven with all the premier facilities of cutting-edge luxe living on your doorstep.”

It should have looked pretty damn sexy-like I said before, other people can get their kicks being snobby about new developments if they want, but I love them; they feel positive, like big bets placed on the future. For some reason, though-maybe because I’d seen what was outside-this brochure struck me as what Richie would have called creepy.

Sinéad jabbed a stubby finger at the brochure. “That’s what we were promised. All that. Says it in the contract and everything.”

“And that’s not what you got?” Richie asked.

She snorted. “Does it look like it?”

He shrugged. “It’s not finished yet. Could be great when it is.”

“It’s not going to be bleeding finished. People stopped buying, with the recession, so the builders stopped building. We went out one morning a few months back and they were gone. Everything, diggers and all. Never came back.”

“Jaysus,” Richie said, shaking his head.

“Yeah, Jaysus. Our downstairs toilet’s banjaxed, but the plumber who put it in won’t come and fix it ’cause he was never paid. Everyone does be saying we should go to court and get compensation, but who’d we bring?”

“The builders?” I suggested.

She gave me that flat stare again, like she was considering punching me for being such a thick. “Um, yeah, we did actually think of that. Can’t find them. They started hanging up on us; now they’ve changed their number. We went to yous lot, even. Yous said our toilet wasn’t a police matter .”

Richie lifted the brochure to get her attention back. “What about all this stuff, the childcare and that?”

“That,” Sinéad said. Her mouth squashed up in disgust. It made her even uglier. “In there’s the only place you’ll ever see that. We complained about the childcare place a load of times-that was one of the reasons we bought here, and then hello, nothing? It opened, in the end. Closed after a month ’cause there was only five kids going. Where the playground was supposed to be, that’s like something out of Baghdad; kids’d take their life in their hands playing there. The leisure center never even got built. We complained about that too, they put an exercise bike in an empty house and said there you go. Bike got robbed.”

“How about the shop?”

A humorless sniff of laughter. “Yeah, right. I’ve to go five miles to buy milk, to the petrol station on the motorway. We haven’t got streetlights . I’m afraid for my life to go out on me own after dark, there could be rapists or anything-there’s a load of non-nationals renting a house over in Ocean View Close. And if something happened to me, would yous lot come out and do anything about it? My husband rang yous a few months back, when there was a bunch of knackers having a party in one of them houses across the road. Yous didn’t show up till the morning. We could’ve been burnt out of it for all you’d care.”

In other words, getting anything out of Sinéad was always going to be this much fun. I said, “Do you know if the Spains had been having any similar problems-with the development company, with the partiers across the road, with anyone?”

Shrug. “Wouldn’t know. Like I said, we weren’t friendly, know what I mean? What happened to them, anyway? Are they dead, or what?”

Before long, the morgue boys were going to be bringing out the bodies. I said, “Maybe Jayden should wait in another room.”

Sinéad eyed him. “No point. He’ll only listen at the door.” Jayden nodded.

I said, “There’s been a violent attack. I’m not in a position to give you details, but the crime in question is murder.”

“Jaysus,” Sinéad breathed, swaying forward. Her mouth stayed open, wet and avid. “Who’s been kilt?”

“We can’t give you that information.”

“Did he go for her, did he?”

Jayden had forgotten about his game. On the screen a zombie was frozen splayed in mid-fall, with scraps of its head mushrooming everywhere. I asked, “Do you have any reason to think he might go for her?”

That wary flick of her eyelids. She slumped back in the chair and folded her arms again. “I was only asking.”

“If you do, Mrs. Gogan, you need to tell us.”

“I don’t know and I don’t care.”

Bullshit, but I know that thick, lumpy stubborn: the harder I pushed, the more solid it would get. “Right,” I said. “In the last few months, have you seen anyone around the estate who you didn’t recognize?”

Jayden let out a high, sharp snicker. Sinéad said, “Never see anyone, hardly. And I wouldn’t recognize most of them anyway. We’re not, like, all buddy-buddy out here. I’ve friends of my own; I don’t need to be hanging off the neighbors.”

Translated, you couldn’t have paid the neighbors enough to hang out with the Gogans. They were probably all just jealous. “Then have you seen anyone who looked out of place? Anyone who worried you for any reason?”

“Only the non-nationals in the Close. There’s dozens of them in that house. I’d say the lot of them are illegal. You’re not going to check that out either, though, are you?”

“We’ll pass it on to the appropriate department. Has anyone called to the door? Selling something, maybe? Asking to check the pipes or the wiring?”

“Yeah, right. Like anyone cares about our wiring- Jaysus! ” Sinéad shot upright. “Was it, like, some psycho that broke in? Like on that show on the telly, like a serial killer?”

All of a sudden she looked alive. Fear had knocked the blankness off her face. I said, “We can’t give details of-”

“’Cause if it’s that, you better tell me now , right? I’m not staying here waiting for some sick bastard to come in and torture us, yous lot would stand there and watch him go at it before you’d do a bleeding thing-”