Tana French - Broken Harbour

“What about blood? On the keyboard or the mouse, specifically?”

Larry shook his head. “There was some spatter on the monitor, a couple of drops on the side of the keyboard. No smudges on the keys or the mouse, though. No one used them with blood on his fingers, if that’s what you’re asking.”

I said, “So it looks like the computer came before the murders-before the adults, anyway. That’s some nerve he’s got, if he sat here playing with their internet history while they were asleep upstairs.”

“The computer didn’t have to come first,” Richie said. “Those gloves-they were leather, they’d have been stiff, specially if they were all bloody. Maybe he couldn’t type in them, took them off; they’d kept the blood off his fingers…”

Most rookies on their first outings keep their mouths shut and nod at whatever I say. Usually this is the right call, but every once in a while, watching other partners argue and bat theories back and forth and call each other every shade of stupid gives me a flash of something that could be loneliness. It was starting to feel good, working with Richie. “Then he sat there playing with Pat and Jenny’s internet history while they were bleeding out four feet from him,” I said. “Some nerve, either way.”

“Hello?” Larry inquired, waving at us. “Remember me? Remember how I told you the handprints weren’t the good bit?”

“I like saving my dessert for last,” I said. “Whenever you’re ready, Larry, we would love the good bit.”

He got each of us by an elbow and turned us towards the sweep of congealing blood. “Here’s where the male victim was, amn’t I right? Face down, head towards the hall door, feet towards the window. According to your buffaloes, the female was to his left, lying on her left side facing him, propped against his body, with her head on his upper arm. And here, just about eighteen inches from where her back would have been, we have this .”

He pointed to the floor, to the Jackson Pollock gibber of blood that radiated out around the puddle. I said, “A shoeprint?”

“Actually, a couple of hundred shoeprints, God help us. But take a look at this one here.”

Richie and I bent closer. The print was so faint I could barely see it against the marbled pattern of the tiles, but Larry and his boys see things the rest of us don’t.

“This one,” Larry said, “is special. It’s a print from a man’s left runner, size ten or eleven, made in blood. And get this: it doesn’t belong to either of the uniforms, it doesn’t belong to either of the paramedics- some people have the brains to wear their shoe covers-and it doesn’t belong to either of your victims.”

The swell of satisfaction practically burst his boiler suit. He had every right to be pleased. “Larry,” I said, “I think I love you.”

“Take a number. I don’t want to get your hopes up too high, though. For one thing, it’s only half a print-one of your buffaloes obliterated the other half-and for another, unless your fella’s a total eejit, that shoe’s at the bottom of the Irish Sea by now. But if you should somehow get your hands on it, here’s where the luck comes in: this print is perfect. I couldn’t take a better one myself. When we get the pics back to the lab, we’ll be able to tell you the size and, if you give us enough time, very possibly the make and model. Find me the actual shoe, and I’ll have it matched for you inside a minute.”

I said, “Thanks, Larry. You were right, as always: that’s a good bit.”

I had caught Richie’s eye and started moving towards the door, but Larry batted me on the arm. “Did I say I was done? Now this is preliminary, Scorch, you know the drill, don’t quote me on any of this or I may have to divorce you. But you said you wanted anything we could give you about what the struggle could have looked like.”

“Don’t I always? All contributions gratefully accepted.”

“It’s looking like the fight was confined to this room, just like you thought. In here, though, it was full-on. It went the whole width of the room-well, you can tell that yourselves from the way the place is wrecked, but I mean the part after the stabbing started. We’ve got a beanbag right over there at the far side that’s been slashed open by a bloody knife, we’ve got a big spray of blood spatter on the wall on this side, above the table, and we’ve counted at least nine separate sprays in between.” Larry pointed and the sprays leapt out from the wall at me, suddenly vivid as paint. “Some of those probably come from the male vic’s arm-you heard Cooper, it was bleeding all over the place; if he swings his arm to defend himself, he’s going to throw off blood-and some of them probably come from your boy swinging his weapon. Between the two of them, anyway, an awful lot of swinging went on. And the sprays are at different levels, different angles: your boy was stabbing while the vics were fighting back, while they were on the ground…”

Richie’s shoulder jumped; he tried to cover it by scratching like something had bitten him. Larry said, almost gently, “It’s actually a big plus. The messier the fight, the more evidence gets left behind: prints, hairs, fibers… Give me a nice bloody scene any day.”

I pointed to the door into the hallway. “What about over there? Did they get anywhere near there?”

Larry shook his head. “Doesn’t look like it. Not a sausage within about four feet of that door: no spatter, no bloody footprints except the uniforms’ and the paramedics’, nothing out of place. All just as God and the decorators intended.”

“Is there a phone in here? A cordless, maybe?”

“Not that we’ve found.”

I said, to Richie, “You see what I’m getting at.”

“Yeah. The landline was out on the hall table.”

“Right. Why didn’t Patrick or Jennifer go for it and hit 999, or at least try to? How did he restrain both of them at once?”

Richie shrugged. His eyes were still moving across the end wall, from blood spray to blood spray. “You heard your woman Gogan,” he said. “We don’t have a great rep around this estate. They could’ve figured there was no point.”

The image pressed up against the inside of my skull: Pat and Jenny Spain throat-deep in terror, believing that we were too far away and too indifferent even to be worth calling, that all the world’s protections had deserted them; that it was just the two of them, with the dark and the sea roaring up on every side, on their own against a man with a knife in one hand and their children’s deaths in the other. Going by the tight movement of Richie’s jaw, he was picturing the same thing. I said, “Another possibility is two separate struggles. Our man does his thing upstairs, and then either Pat or Jenny wakes up and hears him on his way out-Pat would add up better, Jenny would be less likely to go investigating on her own. He goes after the guy, catches him in here, tries to hang onto him. That would explain the weapon of opportunity, and the extent of the struggle: our man’s trying to get a big, strong, furious guy off of him. The fight wakes Jenny, but by the time she gets here, our man’s taken Pat down, leaving him free to deal with her. The whole thing could have gone very fast. It doesn’t take that long to make this kind of mess, not when there’s a blade involved.”

Richie said, “That’d make the kids the main targets.”

“It’s looking that way anyhow. The children’s murders are organized, neat: there was some kind of plan there, and everything went according to that plan. The adults were a bloody, out-of-control mess that could easily have ended very differently. Either he wasn’t planning to cross paths with the adults at all, or he had a plan for them, too, and something went wrong. Either way, he started with the kids. That tells me they were probably his main priority.”