Tana French - Broken Harbour

Too little too late. The mortgage was three months in arrears and there were two letters from the lender-some cowboy-sounding outfit called HomeTime-the second one a lot nastier than the first. In June the Spains had swapped their bill-pay mobiles for pay-as-you-go, and both of them had more or less stopped calling people-four months’ worth of phone-credit receipts were paper-clipped together, barely enough to keep a teenage girl going for a week. The SUV had gone back where it came from at the end of July; they were a month behind on the Volvo, four months behind on the credit card and fifty quid behind on the electricity. As of their last statement, there had been three hundred and fourteen euros and fifty-seven cents in the current account. If the Spains had been into anything dodgy, they were either very bad at it or very, very good.

Even when they got careful, though, they had kept their wireless broadband. I needed to get Computer Crime to flag that computer every shade of urgent. Patrick and Jenny might have had no one in the flesh, but they had had the whole internet to talk to, and some people tell cyberspace the things they wouldn’t tell their best friends.

In a way, you could probably say they had been broke even before Patrick lost his job. He had made good money, but their credit card had a six-grand limit and it had spent most of the time maxed out-there were a lot of three-figure charges to Brown Thomas, Debenhams, a few websites with vaguely familiar girly names-and then there were the two car loans and the mortgage. But only innocents think broke is made of how much you earn and how much you owe. Ask any economist: broke is made of how you feel. The credit crunch didn’t happen because people woke up any poorer than they’d been the day before; it happened because people woke up scared.

Back in January, when Jenny had spent 270 euros on some website called Shoe 2 You, the Spains had been doing just fine. By July, when she had been too scared to change the locks against an intruder, they had been broke as all hell.

Some people get hit by a tidal wave, dig in their nails and hold on; they stay focused on the positive, keep visualizing the way through till it opens up in front of them. Some lose hold. Broke can lead people to places they would never have imagined. It can nudge a law-abiding citizen onto that blurred crumbling edge where a dozen kinds of crime feel like they’re only an arm’s reach away. It can scour away at a lifetime of mild, peaceful decency until all that’s left is teeth and claws and terror. You could almost catch the stench of fear, dank as rotting seaweed, coming up from the dark space at the back of the closet where the Spains had kept their monsters locked down. I said, “It looks like we might not need to go chasing after sister-history, after all.”

Richie ran a thumb through the bank statements again, came to rest on that pathetic last page. “Jesus,” he said, shaking his head.

“Straight-up guy, wife and kids, good job, got his house and his life just the way he likes them; then out of the blue, hey presto, it’s crumbling around his ears. His job’s gone, his car’s gone, his house is going-for all we know, Jenny could have been planning to leave him now that he wasn’t providing, take the kids with her. That could have been what pushed him over the edge.”

“All in less than a year,” Richie said. He put the bank statements down on the bed next to the HomeTime letters, holding them between his fingertips like they were radioactive. “Yeah. That could do it, all right.”

“We’ve still got plenty of ifs on the table. But if Larry’s lads don’t find any evidence of an outsider, and if the weapon turns up somewhere accessible, and if Jenny Spain doesn’t wake up and give us a very plausible story about how someone other than her husband did this… This case could be over a lot sooner than we were expecting.”

That was when my phone rang again.

“And there you go,” I said, fishing it out of my pocket. “How much do you want to bet this is one of the floaters to say we’ve got the weapon, somewhere nice and close?”

It was Marlboro Man, and he was so excited his voice was cracking like a teenager’s. “Sir,” he said. “Sir, you need to see this.”

He was in Ocean View Walk, the double line of houses-you couldn’t exactly call it a street-between Ocean View Rise and the water. The other floaters’ heads popped out of gaps in walls as we passed, like curious animals’. Marlboro Man waved to us from a second-floor window.

The house had got as far as walls and roof, gray blocks heavy with tangled green creepers. The front garden was chest-high weeds and gorse, crowding up the drive and in at the empty doorway. We had to climb the rusted scaffolding, shaking creepers off our feet, and swing ourselves through a window-hole.

Marlboro Man said, “I wasn’t sure whether to… I mean, I know you were busy, sir, but you said to call you if we found anything that could be interesting. And this…”

Someone had, carefully and over plenty of time, turned the top floor of the house into his own private lair. A sleeping bag, one of the serious ones meant for semi-professional wilderness expeditions, weighted down at the bottom with a rough lump of concrete. Thick plastic sheeting tacked over the window-holes, to keep out the wind. Three two-liter bottles of water, neatly lined up against a wall. A clear plastic storage tub just big enough for a stick of Right Guard, a bar of soap, a washcloth, a toothbrush and a tube of toothpaste. A dustpan and brush in one clean corner: no spiderwebs here. A supermarket bag holding another chunk of concrete, a couple of empty Lucozade bottles, a crumple of chocolate wrappers and a sandwich crust sticking out of squashed tinfoil. One of those plastic rain hoods that old women wear, hung on a nail in a beam. And a pair of black binoculars, lying on top of the sleeping bag next to their battered case.

They didn’t look particularly high-end, but then they hadn’t needed to be. The back window-holes looked straight down into Patrick and Jenny Spain’s lovely glass kitchen, just thirty or forty feet away. Larry and his gang were discussing something to do with one of the beanbags.

“Sweet Jaysus,” Richie said softly.

I didn’t say a word. I was so angry that all that would have come out was a roar. Everything I knew about this case had lifted itself high, heaved itself upside down and come slamming down on top of me. This wasn’t the lookout post for some hitman hired to get back money or drugs-a professional would have cleaned up before he did the job, we would never have known he had been there. This was Richie’s mentaller, bringing all his own trouble with him.

Patrick Spain was the one in a hundred, after all. He had done everything right. He had married his childhood sweetheart, they had made two healthy kids, he had bought a nice house and worked his arse off paying for it and packing it full and sparkling with all the stuff that would make it into the perfect home. He had done every single fucking thing he was supposed to do. Then this little piece of shit had strolled up with his cheap binoculars and nuked every atom of that to ashes, and left Patrick with nothing but the blame.

Marlboro Man was eyeing me anxiously, worried he had screwed up again. “Well well well,” I said coolly. “Looks like some of the heat’s off Patrick.”

Richie said, “It’s like a sniper’s nest.”

“It’s exactly like a sniper’s nest. All right: everybody out. Detective, ring your mates and tell them to pull back to the crime scene. Tell them to go casually, not like anything big’s happened, but go now .”

Richie raised his eyebrows; Marlboro Man opened his mouth, but something in my face made him shut it again. I said, “This guy could be watching us right now. That’s the one thing we know about him, isn’t it? He likes watching. I guarantee you he’s been hanging around all morning, waiting to see how we liked his handiwork.”