Tana French - Broken Harbour

It was the first actual emotion we’d seen out of her. The ghost-blue children next door: nothing but gossip fodder, no more real than some TV show, right up until the danger might be personal. I said, “I can promise you we won’t stand there and watch.”

“Don’t you disrespect me! I’ll get onto the radio, I will, I’ll ring the Joe Duffy Show -”

And we would spend the rest of this investigation battling our way through a media cyclone of cops-don’t-care-about-the-little-guy hysteria. I’ve been there. It feels like someone’s using a tennis ball machine to fire starving pug dogs at you. Before I could come up with something soothing, Richie leaned forward and said earnestly, “Mrs. Gogan, you’ve got every right to be worrying. Sure, you’re a mammy.”

“Exactly. I’ve got my kids to think about. I’m not gonna-”

“Was it a pedophile?” Jayden wanted to know. “What’d he do to them?”

I was starting to see why Sinéad ignored him. “Now, you know there’s a load we can’t be telling you,” Richie said, “but I can’t leave a mammy to worry, so I’m trusting you not to pass this on. Can I do that, yeah?”

I almost cut him off right there, but he had been working this interview well, so far. And Sinéad was calming down, that avid look creeping back up under the fear. “Yeah. All right.”

“I’m gonna put it like this,” Richie said. He leaned closer. “You’ve got nothing to be afraid of. If anyone dangerous is out there, and I’m only saying if , we’re doing everything that needs doing about it.” He left an impressive pause and did something meaningful with his eyebrows. “Do you get me, yeah?”

Confused silence. “Yeah,” Sinéad said, in the end. “Course.”

“You do, of course. Now remember: not a word.”

She said primly, “I wouldn’t.” She would tell everyone she knew, obviously, but she had shag-all to tell them: she would have to stick to a smug look and vague hints about secret info she couldn’t share. It was a cute little trick. Richie went up a rung on my ladder.

“And you’re not worried any more, sure you’re not? Now that you know.”

“Ah, no. I’m grand.”

The baby monitor let out a furious shriek. “For fuck’s sake ,” said Jayden, hitting Play and turning up the zombie volume.

“Baby’s awake,” Sinéad said, without moving. “I’ve to go.”

I said, “Is there anything else you can tell us about the Spains? Anything at all?”

Another shrug. That flat face didn’t change, but something flickered in her eyes. We would be coming back to the Gogans.

On our way down the drive I said to Richie, “You want to talk about creepy? Take a look at that kid.”

“Yeah,” Richie said. He fingered his ear and glanced over his shoulder at the Gogans’. “Something he’s not telling us.”

“Him? The mother, sure. But the kid?”

“Definitely.”

“Right. When we come back to them, you can take a crack at him.”

“Yeah? Me?”

“You did a good job in there. Have a think about how you’re going to go about it.” I tucked my notebook into my pocket. “Meanwhile, who else do you want to ask about the Spains?”

Richie turned back to face me. “D’you know something?” he said. “I haven’t got a clue. Normally I’d say let’s talk to the families, the neighbors, the victims’ friends, the people they work with, the lads down the pub where he drinks, the people who saw them last. But they were both out of work. There’s no pub for him to go to. Nobody calls round, not even their families, not when it means coming all this way. It could’ve been weeks since anyone even saw them, except maybe at the school gates. And that’s the neighbors.”

He jerked his head backwards. Jayden was pressed up against the sitting-room window, controller in one hand, mouth still hanging open. He saw me catch him looking, but he didn’t even blink.

“The poor bastards,” Richie said softly. “They’d no one.”

The two sets of neighbors at the other end of the road were out, at work or wherever. Cooper was gone, presumably off to the hospital to have a look at whatever was left of Jenny Spain. The morgue van was gone: the bodies would be headed for the same hospital to wait their turn for Cooper’s attention, only a floor or two away from Jenny, if she had made it this far.

The Bureau team were still working hard. Larry flapped a hand at me from the kitchen. “Come here, you, young fella. Have a look at this.”

“This” was the baby-monitor viewers, five of them, neatly laid out in clear evidence bags on the counter, all covered in black print dust. “Found the fifth one in that corner over there, under a bunch of kiddie books,” Larry said triumphantly. “His Lordship wants video cameras, His Lordship gets video cameras. And they’re good ones, too. I’m no expert on the baby gear, but I’d say these are high-end. They pan, they zoom, they do color during the daytime and black and white on automatic infrared in the dark, they probably make you poached eggs in the morning…” He walked two fingers along the line of monitors, clicking his tongue happily to himself, picked one and pressed the power button through the bag. “Guess what that is. Go on, have a guess.”

The screen lit up in black and white: gray cylinders and rectangles crowding in at each side, floating white dust motes, a shapeless patch of darkness hovering in the middle. I said, “The Blob?”

“That’s what I was thinking myself. But then Declan-that’s Declan, over there; wave hello to the nice men, Declan-he noticed that this cupboard here was just a teeny crack open, so he took a look inside. And guess what he found?”

Larry flung open the cupboard with a flourish. “Lookie, lookie.”

A ring of sullen red lights stared up at us for a second, then faded and vanished. The camera was stuck to the inside of the cupboard door with what looked like a full roll of duct tape. The cereal boxes and tins of peas had been pushed to the sides of the shelves. Behind them, someone had bashed a plate-sized hole in the wall.

“What the hell ,” I said.

“Hold your horses right there. Before you say anything, take a look at this.”

Another monitor. The same fuzzy shades of monochrome: slanting beams, paint tins, some spiky mechanical tangle I couldn’t make out. I said, “The attic?”

“The very spot. And that thing on the floor? It’s a trap . An animal trap. And not a sweet little mousey-catchey thingy, either. I’m not some kind of expert wilderness man, I wouldn’t know, but that thing looks like it could take down a puma .”

Richie asked, “Is there bait in it?”

“I like him,” Larry said, to me. “Smart young fella; goes straight to the heart of things. He’ll go far. No, Detective Curran, unfortunately no bait, so no way to guess what on earth they were trying to catch. There’s a hole under the eaves where something could have got in-now don’t get excited, Scorcher, we’re not looking at a person here. Maybe a fox on a diet could just about have squeezed through, but nothing that would need a bear trap. We checked the attic for paw prints and droppings, see if we could get a hint that way, but there’s nothing bigger than a spider’s poo. If your vics had vermin, they’re very, very discreet vermin.”

I said, “Have we got prints?”

“Oh God yes, prints by the dozen. Fingerprints all over the cameras and the trap, and on that arrangement over the attic hatch. But young Gerry says don’t quote him on this, but at a very preliminary glance there’s no reason to think they’re not consistent with your vic-this vic here, obviously, not the kiddies. Same for the footprints up in the attic: adult male, shoe size matches this boyo.”