Tana French - Broken Harbour

“What about the holes in the walls-anything around there?”

“Again, bucket loads of prints-you weren’t joking about keeping us busy, were you? A lot of them, going by the size, they’re the kiddies exploring. Most of the rest, Gerry says same again: no reason to think they’re not your victim, he’ll need to get them into the lab to confirm. Offhand, I’d say the vics made the holes themselves, nothing to do with last night.”

I said, “Look at this place, Larry. I’m a tidy kind of guy, but my gaff hasn’t been in this good shape since the day I moved in. These people were beyond houseproud. They lined up their shampoo bottles. I’ll give you fifty quid if you can find me one speck of dust. Why go to all that hassle keeping your house in perfect nick, and then bash holes in the walls? And if you have to bash holes, why not fix them? Or at least cover them up?”

“People are mad,” Larry said. He was losing interest; he cares about what happened, not why. “All of them. You should know that, Scorch. I’m just saying, if someone from outside made those holes, it looks like either the walls have been cleaned since, or else he wore gloves.”

“Anything else around the holes? Blood, drug residue, anything?”

Larry shook his head. “No blood, inside the holes or around them, except where they got in the way of spatter from this mess. No drug residue that we’ve found, but if you think we could be missing it, I’ll get a drug dog in.”

“Hold off on that for now, unless something comes up pointing that way. What about in here, in the blood? No prints that couldn’t have come from our vics?”

“Have you seen this place? How long do you think we’ve been here? Ask me again in a week . You can see for yourself, there’s enough bloody footprints for Dracula’s marching band, but I bet you most of them are the uniforms and the paramedics and their great big clumsy feet. We’ll just have to hope that a few prints from the actual crime had dried enough to stay in shape even with that lot wandering back and forth all over them. Same for the bloody handprints: we’ve got loads, but whether there’s any good ones left is anyone’s guess.”

He was in his element: Larry loves complications and he loves grousing. “And if anyone can salvage them, Lar, it’s you. Any sign of the vics’ phones?”

“Your wish is my command. Her mobile was on her bedside table, his was on the hall table, and we’ve bagged the landline just for funsies. Got the computer, too.”

“Beautiful,” I said. “Send it all down to Computer Crime. What about keys?”

“A full set in her purse, on the hall table: two front door keys, back door key, car key. Another full set in his coat pocket. A set of spares for the house in the drawer of the hall table. No Golden Bay Resort pen, not so far, but we’ll let you know.”

“Thanks, Larry. We’ll go have a root around upstairs, if that’s OK.”

“And here I was worried this would be just another boring overdose,” Larry said happily, as we were leaving. “Thank you , Scorcher. I owe you one.”

The Spains’ bedroom was glowing a cozy, fuzzy gold-curtains stayed closed, against salivating neighbors and journalists with zoom lenses, but Larry’s lot had left the lights on for us when they were done printing the switches. The air had that indefinable intimate smell of a lived-in place: the faintest tint of shampoo, aftershave, skin.

There was a fitted wardrobe along one wall and two cream-colored chests of drawers in the corners, the curly-edged kind that someone’s gone at with sandpaper to make them look old and interesting. On top of the chest on Jenny’s side were three framed eight-by-tens. Two were squashy red babies; the one in the middle was a wedding shot taken on the stairway of some fancy country house hotel. Patrick in a tux with a pink tie and a pink rose in his buttonhole, Jenny in a fitted dress with a train that spread out over the stairs below them, bouquet of pink roses, lots of dark wood, lances of sunlight through the ornate landing window. Jenny was pretty, or had been. Average height, nice slim figure, with long hair that she had turned straight and blond and twisted into some complicated thing on top of her head. Patrick had been in better shape then, broad-chested and flat-stomached. He had an arm around Jenny, and both of them were smiling from ear to ear.

I said, “Let’s start with the chests of drawers,” and headed for Jenny’s. If one of this pair had secrets stashed away, it was her. The world would be a different place, a lot more difficult for us and a lot more ignorantly blissful for husbands, if women would just throw things away.

The top drawer was mainly makeup, plus a pill packet-Monday’s pill was gone, she had been up-to-date-and a blue velvet jewelry box. She was into jewelry, everything from cheap bling through some nice tasteful pieces that looked pretty upmarket to me-my ex-wife liked her rocks, I know my way around carats. The emerald ring Fiona had mentioned was still there, in a battered black presentation box, waiting for Emma to grow up. I said, “Look at this.”

Richie glanced across from Patrick’s underwear drawer-he was working fast and neatly, giving each pair of boxers a quick shake and tossing it on a pile on the floor. He said, “So, not robbery.”

“Probably not. Nothing professional, anyway. If things went wrong, an amateur might get spooked and run for it, but a professional-or a debt collector-wouldn’t go without getting what he came for.”

“An amateur doesn’t fit. Like we said before: this wasn’t random.”

“True enough. Can you give me a theory that does cover what we’ve got?”

Richie unrolled pairs of socks and dumped them on the pile, getting his ideas straight. “The intruder Jenny talked about,” he said, after a moment. “Let’s say he finds a way to get back in, more than once maybe. Fiona said herself, Jenny wouldn’t have told her.”

No clandestine condoms at the bottom of the jewelry box, no wraps of Mummy’s Little Helper tucked in with the makeup brushes. I said, “But Jenny did tell Fiona she was going to start using the alarm. How does he get around that?”

“He got around the locks, the first time. Looks like Patrick thought he was coming in through the attic. He might’ve been right. Up through the house next door, maybe.”

“If Larry and his team had found an access point in the attic, they’d have told us. And you heard them: they looked.”

Richie started folding socks and boxers back into the drawer, taking care over it. We don’t generally bother to leave things perfect; I couldn’t tell whether he was thinking of Jenny having to come home to this place-which, given the odds of anyone buying it, was actually a possibility-or of Fiona having to clean it out. Either way, the empathy was something he was going to have to watch. He said, “OK, so maybe your man’s got a way around the alarm system. That could be what he does for a living. Could even be how he picked the Spains: he installed their system, got hung up on them…”

“The system came with the house, according to that brochure. It was here before they were. Dial back the Cable Guy there, old son.” Jenny’s underwear drawer was divided neatly into special-occasion sexies, white exercise gear and what I assumed were everyday pink-and-white frillies; nothing kinky, no toys, apparently the Spains had been good old vanilla. “But let’s assume, just for a moment, that our man’s found a way to gain access. Then what?”

“He starts getting more in-your-face, smashes those holes in the walls. No way to stop Patrick from finding out then. Maybe Patrick thinks like Jenny: he wants to know what the story is here, he’d rather catch the guy than shut him out or scare him off. So he sets up surveillance on the spots where he knows, or thinks, your man’s been.”