Tana French - Broken Harbour

They nodded. I said, “I’ll also need a pair of techs to spend the night in here.”

“Not me,” Larry said. “You know I love you, Scorcher, but I’ve got a previous engagement and I’m too old for the all-night carry-on, no double entendre intended.”

“No problem. I’m sure someone could do with the overtime, am I right?” Larry mimed his jaw hitting his chest-I have a rep for not authorizing overtime. A few of the techs nodded. “You can bring sleeping bags and take turns getting some kip in the sitting room, if you want to; I just need some kind of ongoing visible activity. Bring things back and forth from your car, swab things in the kitchen, take a laptop out there and pull up a graph that looks professional… Your job is to get our man interested enough that he can’t resist the temptation to go up to his nest, get his binoculars and check out what you’re doing.”

“Bait,” said Gerry the print tech.

“Exactly. We’ve got bait, trackers, hunters, and we’ll just have to hope our man walks into the trap. We’ll have a couple of hours off between six o’clock and nightfall; get something to eat, head back to the office if you need to check in, pick up anything you’ll want for the stakeout. For now, I’ll let you get back to what you’re doing. Thanks, lads and ladies.”

They moved off-two of the techs were flipping a coin for the overtime, a couple of floaters were trying to impress me or each other by taking notes. The scaffolding had stamped smears of rust onto the sleeve of my overcoat. I found a tissue in my pocket and headed out to the kitchen to dampen it.

Richie followed me. I said, “If you need something to eat, you can take the car and find that petrol station the Gogan woman talked about.”

He shook his head. “I’m grand.”

“Good. And you’re OK for tonight?”

“Yeah. No probs.”

“At six we’ll head back to HQ, brief the Super, pick up anything we need, then meet up again and come back here.” If Richie and I could make it into town fast enough, and if the briefing didn’t take too long, there was just a chance I would have time to get hold of Dina and put her in a taxi to Geri’s. “You’re welcome to put in for overtime if you want. I’m not planning to.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t believe in overtime.” Larry’s boys had cut the water and taken out the sink trap, in case our boy had washed up, but a leftover trickle came out of the tap. I caught it on the tissue and scrubbed at my sleeve.

“I heard that, all right. How come?”

“I’m not a babysitter, or a waiter. I don’t charge by the hour. And I’m not some politician looking for ways to get paid three times over for every tap of work I do. I get paid my salary to do my job, whatever that happens to mean.”

Richie didn’t comment. He said, “You’re pretty definite that this guy’s watching us, aren’t you?”

“On the contrary: he’s probably miles away, at work, if he’s got a job to go to and if he had the cool to go in today. But, like I said to Larry, I’m not taking any chances.”

In the corner of my eye something white flicked. I was facing the windows, braced ready to lunge at the back door, before I knew I had moved. One of the techs was out in the garden, squatting on a paving stone, swabbing.

Richie let that speak for itself while I straightened up and stashed the tissue in my briefcase. Then he said, “So maybe ‘definite’ isn’t the right word. But you think he is.”

The great Rorschach blot on the floor where the Spains had lain was darkening, crusting at the edges. Above it, the windows ricocheted gray afternoon light back and forth, throwing off dislocated, off-kilter reflections: swirling leaves, a slice of wall, the heart-stopping nosedive of a bird against cloud. “Yeah,” I said. “I do. I think he’s watching.”

And that left us with the rest of the afternoon to get through, on our way to that night. The media had started swarming up-later than I’d expected; clearly their satnavs didn’t like the place any better than mine had-and were doing their thing, hanging over the crime-scene tape to get shots of the techs going in and out, doing pieces to camera in their best solemn voices. In my book, the media are a necessary evil: they live off the animal inside us, they bait their front pages with secondhand blood for the hyenas to snuffle up, but they come in useful often enough that you want to stay on their good side. I checked my hair in the Spains’ bathroom mirror and went out to give them a statement. For a second I actually considered sending Richie. The thought of Dina hearing my voice talking about Broken Harbor sent heartburn flaring across my chest.

There were a couple of dozen of them out there, everything from broadsheets to tabloids and from national TV to local radio. I kept it as brief and as monotone as possible, on the off chance that they might quote me instead of using the actual footage, and I made sure they got the impression that all four of the Spains were dead as dodoes. My man would be watching the news, and I wanted him smug and secure: no living witnesses, the perfect crime, give yourself a pat on the back for being such a winner and then come on down to take another look at your prize work.

The search team and the dog handler arrived not long afterwards, which meant we had plenty of cast members for the drama in the front garden-the Gogan woman and her kid stopped pretending they weren’t watching and stuck their heads out of the door, and the reporters practically burst the crime-scene tape trying to see what was going on, which I took as a good sign. I bent over something imaginary in the hall with the rest of the gang, shouted meaningless jargon out the door, jogged up and down the drive to get things from the car. It took all the willpower I had not to scan the tangle of houses for a blink of movement, a flash of light off lenses, but I never once looked up.

The dog was a shining, muscled Alsatian that picked up a scent off the sleeping bag in a split second, trailed it to the end of the road and lost it. I had the handler walk the dog through the house-if our man was watching, I needed him to think that was why we had called them in. Then I had the search team take over the weapon hunt, and sent the floaters out on new assignments. Go down to Emma’s school-fast, before it lets out for the day-talk to her teacher, talk to her friends and their parents. Go down to Jack’s preschool, ditto. Go around every shop near the schools, find out where Jenny got those carrier bags that Sinéad Gogan saw, find out if anyone saw someone following her, if anyone has CCTV footage. Go to the hospital where Jenny’s being treated, talk to whichever relatives have shown, track down whichever ones haven’t, make sure all of them know to keep their mouths shut and stay far from the media; go to every hospital within a sixty-mile radius, ask them about last night’s crop of knife wounds, and hope our boy got cut in the struggle. Go ring HQ and find out if the Spains made any calls to the police in the last six months; go ring the Chicago PD and have them send someone to break the news to Pat’s brother, Ian. Go find anyone who lives in this godforsaken place, threaten them with everything up to and including jail time if they tell the media anything they don’t tell us first; find out if they saw the Spains, if they saw anything strange, if they saw anything at all.

Richie and I went back to the house search. It was a different thing, now that the Spains had turned into that half myth, rare as a sweet-voiced hidden bird that no one ever sees alive: genuine victims, innocent to the bone. We had been looking for the thing they had done wrong. Now we were looking for the thing that they could never have guessed they were doing wrong. The receipts that would show who had sold them food, petrol, children’s clothes; the birthday cards that would tell us who had come to Emma’s party, the leaflet that would list the people who had attended some residents’ meeting. We were looking for the bright lure that had hooked something clawed and simian, brought it following them home.