Tana French - The Trespasser

It takes two rings before Lucy answers the intercom, in a voice coated with sleep. ‘’Lo?’

Steve says, ‘Lucy Riordan?’

‘Who’s this?’

‘Detective Garda Stephen Moran. Could we have a word?’

A long second. Then Lucy says, and the sleep’s fallen off her voice, ‘I’ll be down in a minute.’

She opens the door fast and wide awake. She’s short and fit, the kind of fit you get from life, not from the gym – she wears it like it’s owned, not rented. Cropped platinum hair with a long sweep of fringe falling in her face – pale face with clean quick features, smudges of last night’s mascara. She’s wearing a black hoodie, paint-splashed black combats, nothing on her feet, a lot of silver ear jewellery and what looks to me like a fair-sized hangover. She has bugger-all in common with Aislinn Murray, or with what I was expecting.

We have our IDs out and ready. ‘I’m Detective Garda Stephen Moran,’ Steve says, ‘and this is my partner, Detective Garda Antoinette Conway.’ And he pauses. You always leave a gap there.

Lucy doesn’t even look at the IDs. She says, sharp, ‘Is it Aislinn?’ Which is why you leave the gap: it’s unbelievable what people will spill into it.

Steve says, ‘Could we come in for a few minutes?’

She looks at the IDs then; takes her time checking them out, or making some decision. Then: ‘Yeah,’ she says. ‘OK. Come in.’ And she turns and heads up the stairs.

Her flat is on the first floor and I was right, it’s decent: a small sitting room with a kitchenette to one side and two doors leading off the others, for the bedroom and the jacks. She had people over last night – empty cans on the coffee table and under it, thick layer of smoke in the air – but even before that, this place was nothing like Aislinn’s. The curtains are made out of old postcards sewn together with twine, the furniture is a banged-up wooden coffee table and a couple of lopsided sofas covered in Mexican-looking woven throws, and there are four 1970s phones and a stuffed fox on top of a coil of cable beside the telly. Nobody ordered this place through an app.

Me and Steve go for the sofa with its back to the high sash window, leaving Lucy with the limp excuse for daylight hitting her face. I get out my notebook, but I sit forward, letting Steve know that I’m not gonna be sitting this one out altogether. O’Kelly was full of shite, Steve is great with witnesses – not as flashy with it as Breslin, but he can make just about anyone believe he’s on their side – but I used to be pretty good too, not all that long ago, and Lucy doesn’t seem like she’s gonna piss me off. This girl is no idiot.

‘Anyone else home?’ Steve asks. After this conversation, Lucy is going to want backup.

Lucy sits down on the other sofa and tries to look at both of us at once. ‘No. It’s just me. Why…?’

Your basic witness-face is a mix of eager to help, dying to know the story and oh-God-I-hope-I’m-not-in-trouble. Your standard variation, in neighbourhoods where we’re not popular, is a sullen teen-style slouch-stare, including from people who are decades too old to pull off that shite. Lucy isn’t wearing either of those. She’s sitting up straight, feet planted like she’s ready to leap into action, and her eyes are too wide open. Lucy is scared, and she’s wary, and whatever she’s wary about is taking all her focus. There’s a green glass ashtray on the coffee table that she should have emptied before she let cops in. Me and Steve pretend we don’t see it.

‘I’ll just confirm a couple of things,’ Steve says, easily, giving her his best nonthreatening smile. ‘You’re Lucy Riordan, born the twelfth of April ’88, and you work at the Torch Theatre. That’s all correct, yeah?’

Lucy’s back is stiffening up. Nobody likes us knowing stuff they haven’t told us, but she’s liking it even less than most. ‘Yeah. I’m the technical manager.’

‘And you’re friends with Aislinn Murray. Close friends.’

‘We’ve known each other since we were kids. What’s happened?’

I say, ‘Aislinn’s dead.’

Which isn’t me being tactless. After the way she opened the door, I want her reaction neat.

Lucy stares at me. So many expressions collide on her face that I can’t read any of them. She’s not breathing.

I say, not bitchily, ‘Sorry to start your day off like this.’

Lucy grabs for a pack of Marlboro Lights on the coffee table and reefs one out without asking permission. Even her hands look active: strong wrists, short nails, scrapes and calluses. For a second the lighter flame jumps and wavers; then she gets it under control and draws hard on the smoke.

She asks, ‘How?’

Her head is down, that white-blond streak hiding her face. I say, ‘We don’t have any definitive answers yet, but we’re treating the death as suspicious.’

‘That means someone killed her. Right?’

‘Looks like it. Yeah.’

‘Shit,’ Lucy says, low – I’m pretty sure she doesn’t know she’s saying it. ‘Ah, shit. Ah, shit.’

Steve says, ‘Why did you assume we were here about Aislinn?’

Lucy’s head comes up. She’s not crying, which is a relief, but her face is a nasty white; her eyes look like she’s having trouble seeing, or trouble not getting sick. She says, ‘What?’

‘When you came to the door, you said, “Is it Aislinn?” Why would you think that?’

The cigarette’s shaking. Lucy stares at it, curls her fingers tighter to keep it still. ‘I don’t know. I just did.’

‘Think back. There has to have been a reason.’

‘I don’t remember. That’s just what came into my head.’

We wait. In the walls, pipes hoot and groan; upstairs a guy yells something about hot water and someone gallops across the floor, making the postcard curtains tremble. Next to Lucy on the sofa is a Homer Simpson stuffed toy with a Rizla that says princess buttercup stuck to its forehead. Last night was a good one. Next time Lucy sees that toy, she’s gonna shove it to the bottom of her bin.

After a long minute, the line of Lucy’s spine resets. She’s not gonna cry or puke, not now anyway; she’s got other things to do. I’m pretty sure she’s just decided to lie to us.

She taps ash without even clocking the spliff butts in the ashtray. She says – carefully, feeling her way – ‘Aislinn just started seeing this guy Rory. Last night she was cooking him dinner. It was his first time in her house; they’d only met in public places before. So when you said you were Guards, that’s the only thing I could think of: something went wrong there. I mean, I couldn’t think of any other reason you’d want to talk to me.’

Bullshit. Just off the top of my head I can think of half a dozen reasons – the hash, noise complaint from the neighbours, street fight outside and we need witnesses, domestic in another flat ditto, I could keep going – and Lucy’s well able to do the same. Here it is: the lie.

‘Yeah,’ I say. ‘About that. Yesterday evening, you and Aislinn were texting about her dinner date.’ The wariness goes up a notch, as Lucy tries to remember what she said. ‘You told Aislinn to’ – I pretend to check my notebook – ‘“be careful, OK?” Why was that?’

‘Like I said. She hadn’t known him that long, and she was going to be on her own in the house with him.’

Steve is doing puzzled. ‘Is that not a bit paranoid, no?’

Lucy’s eyebrows shoot up and she stares at Steve like he’s the enemy. ‘You think? I wasn’t telling her to have a loaded gun in her bra. Just to mind herself with a strange guy in her house. That’s paranoid?’

‘Sounds like basic good sense to me,’ I say. Lucy turns to me gratefully, relaxing back off the attack. ‘I’d tell my mate the same thing. Had you met Rory?’