Tana French - Broken Harbour

I looked out over the water, into the night that was coming in on the tide, and I felt nothing at all. The beach looked like something I had seen in an old film, once upon a time; that hotheaded boy felt like a character from some book I had read and given away in childhood. Only, somewhere far inside my spine and deep in the palms of my hands, something hummed; like a sound too low to hear, like a warning, like a cello string when a tuning fork strikes the perfect tone to call it awake.

And of course, of bloody fucking course , Dina was waiting for me.

The first thing you notice about my little sister Dina is that she’s the kind of beautiful that makes people, men and women both, forget what they were talking about when she came in. She looks like one of those old pen-and-ink sketches of fairies: slight as a dancer, with skin that never tans, full pale lips and huge blue eyes. She walks like she’s skimming an inch above the ground. This artist she used to go out with once told her she was “pure pre-Raphaelite,” which would have been cuter if he hadn’t dumped her flat on her arse two weeks later. Not that this came as a surprise. The second thing that stands out about Dina is that she is crazy as a bag of cats. Various therapists and psychiatrists have diagnosed various things along the way, but what it comes down to is that Dina is no good at life. It takes a knack that she’s never quite got hold of. She can fake it for months at a stretch, sometimes even a year, but it takes concentration like she’s tightrope walking, and in the end she always wobbles and goes flying. Then she ditches her lousy McJob du jour , her lousy boyfriend du jour ditches her-men who like them vulnerable love Dina, right up until she shows them what vulnerable actually means-and she turns up on my doorstep or Geri’s, generally at some ungodly hour of the morning, making bugger-all sense.

That night, to avoid becoming predictable, she showed up at my work instead. We work out of Dublin Castle, and since it’s a tourist attraction-eight hundred years’ worth of the buildings that have defended this city, in one way or another-anyone can walk straight in off the street. Richie and I were heading across the cobblestones towards the HQ building at a fast stride, and I was arranging the facts in my head ready to lay out for O’Kelly, when a slip of darkness detached itself from the corner of shadow by a wall and flew towards us. Both of us jumped. “ Mikey ,” Dina said, in a fierce undertone, fingers taut as wires clamping around my wrist. “You have to come get me now . Everyone keeps pushing.”

Last time I had seen her, maybe a month before, she had had long rippling fair hair and some kind of floating flowery dress. Since then she had gone grunge: her hair was dyed glossy black and chopped off in a flapper-style bob-the fringe looked like she might have done it herself-and she was wearing a huge, ragged gray cardigan over a white slip, and biker boots. It’s always a bad sign when Dina changes her look. I could have kicked myself for going so long without checking.

I moved her away from Richie, who was trying to get his jaw off the cobblestones. He looked like he was seeing me in a whole new light. “I’ve got you, sweetheart. What’s up?”

“I can’t, Mikey, I can feel stuff in my hair, you know, the wind scraping into my hair? It hurts, it keeps hurting, I can’t find the, not the off switch the button the way it stops.”

My stomach turned into one hard heavy lump. “OK,” I said. “OK. Do you need to come back to my place for a while, yeah?”

“We have to go . You have to listen.”

“We’re going, sweetheart. Just hang on for one second, OK?” I steered her to the steps of one of the castle buildings, closed up for the night after the day’s crop of tourists. “Sit there for me.”

“ Why? Where are you going?”

She was on the edge of panicking. “Right over there,” I said, pointing. “I need to get rid of my partner, so you and I can head home. It’ll take me two seconds.”

“I don’t want your partner. Mikey, there won’t be room, how are we going to squash the fit?”

“Exactly. I don’t want him either. I’ll just send him on his merry way, and then we can get going.” I sat her down on the steps. “OK?”

Dina pulled her knees up and shoved her mouth into the crook of her elbow. “OK,” she said, muffled. “Come on, OK?”

Richie was pretending to check his phone messages, to give me privacy. I kept one eye on Dina. “Listen, Richie. I may not be able to make tonight. Are you still on for it?”

I could see the question marks bouncing up and down in his head, but he knew when to keep his mouth shut. “Sure.”

“Good. Pick a floater. He-or she, if you want Whatshername-can put in for overtime, although you might try to get across the message that waiving it would be a better career move. If anything goes down out there, you ring me at once . It doesn’t matter if you think it’s unimportant, it doesn’t matter if you think you can handle it, you ring me. Got that?”

“Got it.”

“In fact, if nothing goes down, ring me anyway, just so I know I’m up to speed. Every hour, on the hour. If I don’t pick up, you keep ringing till I do. Got it?”

“Got it.”

“Tell the Super I had an emergency but not to worry, I’ll have it under control and be back on the job by tomorrow morning at the latest. Brief him on today and on our plans for tonight-can you do that?”

“I can probably manage that, yeah.”

The twist to the corner of Richie’s mouth said he didn’t appreciate the question, but his ego was low on my priority list right then. “No ‘probably,’ old son: manage it. Tell him the floaters have their assignments for tomorrow, so do the searchers, and we need a sub-aqua team to start work on the bay as early as possible. As soon as you’re done with him, get moving. You’ll need food, warm clothes, a packet of caffeine tabs-coffee’s no good, you don’t want to be pissing every half-hour-and a pair of thermal-imaging goggles: we have to assume this guy has some kind of night-vision gear, and I don’t want him getting the jump on you. And check your gun.” Most of us go a full career without ever unholstering. Some people take that as a license to get sloppy.

“Yeah, I’ve done a couple of stakeouts before,” Richie said, evenly enough that I couldn’t tell whether he was giving me the finger. “See you back here, tomorrow morning?”

Dina was getting antsy, biting off threads from the sleeve of her jumper. “No,” I said. “Not here. I’ll try to get out to Brianstown at some point tonight, but that may or may not happen. If I don’t make it, I’ll meet you down at the hospital for the post-mortems. Six A.M., and for God’s sake don’t be late, or we’ll spend the rest of the morning unknotting Cooper’s knickers.”

“No probs.” Richie pocketed his phone. “Might see you out there. Otherwise, we’ll just have to do our best not to fuck up, yeah?”

I said, “Don’t fuck up.”

“We won’t,” Richie said, more gently; he almost sounded like he was being reassuring. “Good luck.”

He gave me a nod and headed for the door of HQ. He was smart enough not to glance back. “ Mikey ,” Dina hissed, clutching a fistful of the back of my coat. “Can we go ?”

I took a fraction of a second to look up at the dimming sky and throw out a hard urgent prayer to anything that was up there: Let my man have more restraint than I’m giving him credit for. Don’t let him go rushing into Richie’s arms. Make him wait for me.

“ Come on,” I said, putting a hand on Dina’s shoulder-she shoved herself up against my side, all sharp elbows and fast breath, like a spooked animal. “Let’s go.”