Tana French - The Trespasser

Aislinn Murray is sounding like more and more of a laugh riot. I say, ‘I’ve gotta tell you, Lucy, this is coming across pretty weird to me. You and Ash, you were best friends since you were kids, but she tells you nothing about her fella?’

Her eyes come up, wary. ‘I said we’ve been friends since we were kids. I didn’t say we were best friends.’

‘No? Then what were you?’

‘Friends. We hung out in school, we stayed in touch when we grew up. We didn’t have a Vulcan mind meld.’

Steve has this lovely mix of worried and reproachful growing on his face. He says, ‘You know how we got your name? Aislinn had you down as her emergency contact. When you’re picking that, you pick someone who you think cares about you.’

Lucy’s head jerks away from the reproachful frown. ‘Her mum died a few years back, her dad’s not around, she’s an only kid. Who else was she going to put?’

Lying again. For some reason she’s trying to make the friendship sound like a leftover stuck to her shoe, but the layer of warmth when she talked about Aislinn’s idiot rules said different. I say, ‘You’re also the person Aislinn texted and rang most often. Like you said, she didn’t have a lot of mates. She thought of you as her closest friend, all right. Did she know you didn’t feel the same way?’

‘We are friends. I said that. I’m just saying, we don’t live in each other’s pocket. We don’t know everything about each other’s life. OK?’

‘So who would know all about Aislinn’s life? Who was her best friend, if it wasn’t you?’

‘She didn’t have one, not like you mean. Some people don’t.’

Her voice is pulling tighter. I leave it: she’s holding herself together by her fingernails, and I don’t want her going to pieces on us right now. ‘Regardless,’ I say. ‘Me, when I’m going out with someone, I tell my friends, even if they’re not my best bosom buddies. Don’t you?’

Lucy takes a gulp of her water and gets herself back. ‘Yeah. Sure. But Aislinn didn’t.’

‘You said she was dying to talk to you about Rory, how great he was. Did she tell you about other boyfriends, before him? Introduce them to you?’

‘Yeah. I mean, it’s been a few years since she went out with anyone, but yeah, I met him.’

‘She wanted to talk about him, see what you thought of him, all that. Right?’

‘Yeah.’

‘But not this time.’

‘No. Not this time.’

Steve asks, ‘Why did you figure that was?’

Lucy rubs her water glass over a smear of purple paint on the knee of her combats, scrapes at it with a fingernail. She says, ‘I figured the guy was married. Wouldn’t you?’

She’s looking at me. I say, ‘That’d be my first thought, all right. Did you ask her?’

‘I didn’t want to know. As far as I’m concerned, anyone who’s taken is well off limits, and Ash knows that. Neither one of us wanted to have the conversation. It would only have turned into a fight.’

‘You’re saying she might’ve been OK with seeing a married guy, though. They weren’t off limits to her.’

Purple paint flakes away. Lucy rubs it to a smudge between her fingertips. ‘That makes her sound like some homewrecker vamp manhunter. She’s not like that. At all. She just… she’s really unsure. Of a lot of stuff. Does that make sense?’ A quick glance up at me. I nod. Her face looks older than it did when we got here, dragged down around the edges. This conversation is taking a lot out of her. ‘And if the other person’s totally sure, a lot of the time she ends up thinking they’re probably right. So yeah, I could see her hooking up with a married guy. Not because she thought it was OK, or because she didn’t care, but because he convinced her that it might not be not OK.’

‘Gotcha,’ I say. I’m glad Aislinn is the vic and Lucy is the witness here, not the other way round. By this point I would’ve brained Aislinn with something gingham.

‘So you must’ve been well pleased when she hit it off with Rory,’ Steve says. ‘Nice single guy, nothing to cause tension between the two of you, nothing to cause Aislinn hassle. Yeah?’

‘Yeah.’ But there’s a fraction of a second before it. Another brush past something Lucy isn’t telling us.

I say, ‘Did you get the sense she’d finished it with the other fella before she started seeing Rory? Or would you guess she had them both on the go?’

‘How would I know? Like I said-’

‘Was she still being vague about her social plans? Still cancelling on you at the last minute?’

‘I guess. Yeah, she was.’

I say, ‘So that’s why you were worried about Aislinn?’

Lucy’s still messing around with paint smears, elbows on her thighs and her head right down. ‘Anyone would be. I mean, juggling two guys, one of them’s married… that’s not going to end well. And Ash… she’s really naïve, in a lot of ways. It wouldn’t occur to her that this was a pretty volatile situation. I just wanted her to be aware of that.’

This is making more sense, but not enough. ‘You said Rory didn’t set off your alarm bells,’ I say. ‘What about this other guy?’

‘I don’t know anything about him to set off alarm bells. Like I said. I just didn’t like the whole setup.’

She’s tensing, digging her elbows into her thighs. Whatever we’re circling, she’s not happy being this close to it. I’m not happy myself. Lucy is no idiot; she should know this isn’t the time to fuck about. I say, ‘That still doesn’t explain why your mind went straight to Aislinn when we showed up at your door. You want to try again?’

The edge on my voice makes her elbows dig in harder. ‘That’s why. Because what else was it going to be? Maybe I lead a really boring life, but most people I know don’t do anything that could land actual detectives on my doorstep.’

I’m less and less in the mood for bullshit. ‘Right,’ I say. I lean over and give the ashtray a shove so it slides towards Lucy, a little puff of rancid ash rising into the light. ‘Like I said: try again.’

Lucy’s head comes up and she gives me a whole new kind of wary look.

Steve shifts his weight beside me. I know that shift: Leave it.

I consider punching my elbow through his ribs, but the fact is, he’s right. I’ve been getting on well with Lucy, and I’m about to throw that away for good. I say, more gently, ‘We’re not planning on doing anything about that. We’re only interested in Aislinn.’

The wary look fades, but not all the way. Steve – right back in the Good Cop seat, where he’s happiest – says, ‘Tell us a bit about her. How did yous meet?’

Lucy lights another smoke. I love nicotine. It puts witnesses back in their comfort zone when things get tricky, it keeps the vic’s friends and family from going to pieces, it means we can make suspects as antsy as we want and then throw them an instant chill pill when we want them calm again. Non-smokers are double the hassle; you have to find other ways to adjust their dials. If it was my call, everyone involved in murders would be on a pack a day. She says, ‘When we started secondary school. So when we were twelve.’

‘You’re from the same place, yeah? Where’s that?’

‘Greystones.’

Just outside Dublin; smallish town, but big enough that Lucy and Aislinn were hanging out together by choice, not because there was no one else. Steve asks, ‘And what was Aislinn like, back then? If you had to describe her in one word, what would you pick?’

Lucy thinks back. That affection warms her face again. ‘Shy. Really shy. I mean, that wasn’t the most important thing about her, not by miles, but back then it covered up practically everything else.’