Tana French: The Trespasser

I wouldn’t have been itching to get rid of her, not if she’d been getting the slaps. The slit-open eyes give her face a sly look, like a kid cheating at hide-and-seek.

Steve straightens up, leaving me to take whatever time I need. He raises his eyebrows at Sophie and points to the rectangle of light coming through the kitchen door. ‘Can I…?’

‘Knock yourself out. We’ve videoed in there, but we haven’t fingerprinted yet, so don’t go polishing anything.’

Steve picks his way past the techs, into the kitchen. The ceilings are low enough that he practically has to duck, going through the doorway. ‘How’s that going?’ Sophie asks, nodding after him.

‘All right. He’s the least of my problems.’ I let the vic’s hair fall back over her face and stand up. I want to move; if I walked fast and far enough, I could catch up to the memory. If I start pacing around her crime scene, Sophie will kick my arse out the door, lead D or no.

‘Sounds like a blast,’ Sophie says. ‘Now that you’ve seen the place the way we found it, can we turn on the bloody lights and stop fucking about in the dark?’

‘Go for it,’ I say. One of the techs turns on the overhead light, which makes the place even more depressing; at least the headlamps gave it some kind of personality, even if it was a creepy one. I pick my way between yellow evidence markers to the bedroom.

It’s small and it’s spotless. The dressing table – curly white-and-gold yoke with a foofy skirt, like something an eight-year-old would pick out for her princess room – has none of that makeup left scattered on it, just another scented candle and two perfume bottles that are for looks, not use. No tried-and-ditched outfits strewn across the bed; the daisy-pattern duvet is pulled straight and symmetrical, neatly dotted with four of those scatter cushions I’ll never figure out. Aislinn tidied up, when she finished getting ready: hid away every bit of evidence, in case God forbid Lover Boy should figure out she didn’t naturally look like something he’d picked out of a catalogue. He didn’t get this far, but she was expecting him to.

I have a look in the fitted wardrobe. Plenty of clothes, mostly skirt suits and going-out dresses, all of it mid-range block-colour stuff with one sparkly detail, the type of stuff that gets showcased on morning talk shows alongside blood-type diets and skin-resurfacing treatments. Have a look in the curly white-and-gold bookcase: load of romances, load of old kids’ books, load of that godawful shite where the author enlightens you on the meaning of life through the story of a slum kid who learns to fly, few books about crime in Ireland – missing persons, gangland crime, murder; the irony – some urban fantasy stuff that actually looks OK. I flip through the books: the enlightenment shite and the true crime are covered with underlining, but no he-dun-it note falls out. I have a look in the bedside table: daisy-patterned box of tissues, laptop, chargers; six-pack of condoms, unopened. A look in the bin: nothing. A look under the bed: not even a dustball.

The vic’s home is your shot at getting a handle on this person you’re never going to meet. Even for their friends, people filter and spin, and then the friends filter all over again: they don’t want to speak ill of the dead, or they’re feeling maudlin about their poor lost pal, or they don’t want you to misunderstand that little quirk of his. But behind the door of home, those filters fall away. You go through that door and you go looking for what’s not deliberate: what would have been tidied up before anyone called round, what smells weird and what’s down the back of the sofa cushions. The slip-ups that the victim never wanted anyone to see.

This place is giving me nothing. Aislinn Murray is a picture in a glossy magazine. Everything in here is managed as carefully as if she was expecting some candid-camera show to burst in and splash her private life across the internet.

Paranoid? Control freak? Genuinely superhumanly boring?

But please couldn’t you just, don’t you understand how I-

She let more slip and was more vivid in that one moment than in every detail of her home. There was no way I could’ve known, not like she was wearing a sign that said Future Vic , but still: for once I looked a live murder victim in the eye, and I blew her off.

Once the techs finish up we’ll do a serious search, which might give us more, but from the looks of things, Aislinn’s personality – assuming she had one somewhere – doesn’t actually matter. If we can ID Lover Boy and make a solid case against him, we don’t need to give a damn who Aislinn was. It leaves me edgy all the same, hearing that high little-girl voice where there should be nothing.

‘Anything?’ Steve asks, in the doorway.

‘Bugger-all. If she wasn’t lying out there, I’d think she never actually existed. How about the kitchen?’

‘Couple of interesting things. Come look.’

‘Thank Jaysus,’ I say, following him. I’m expecting the kitchen to be chrome and fake granite, Celtic Tiger trendy done on the cheap; instead it’s over-carved pine, pink gingham oilcloth, framed prints of chickens wearing pink gingham aprons. Everything I find out about this woman leaves me with less of a handle on her. Out the back window is the same walled miniature patio I have, except Aislinn put a curly wooden bench on hers, so she could sit out there and enjoy the view of her wall. I check the back door: locked.

‘First thing,’ Steve says. He tugs the oven open, carefully, hooking a gloved finger into the door crack instead of touching the handle.

Two roasting tins, full of food shrivelled into crispy brown wads: what looks like potatoes, and something in pastry. He pulls down the half-open door of the grill: two blackish lumps that started out as either stuffed mushrooms or cowpats.

I say, ‘So?’

‘So it’s all cooked to leather, but it hasn’t actually burned. Because the knobs are still turned on, but the actual cooker’s been switched off at the wall. And look.’

Plate full of vegetables – green beans, peas – on the counter. Pan half-full of water on one of the cooker rings. The knob for the ring is turned on high.

‘Soph,’ I call. ‘Anyone turn off the cooker? You guys, or the uniforms?’

‘We didn’t,’ Sophie yells back. ‘And I said to the uniforms: anything you touched, you tell me now. I’m pretty sure I put the fear of God into them. If they’d been fucking about with the cooker, they’d have ’fessed up.’

‘So?’ I say, to Steve. ‘Maybe Lover Boy was late, Aislinn turned off the cooker.’

Steve shakes his head. ‘The grill, maybe. But would you turn the oven off, or leave it on low and stick all the food in there to keep warm? And would you let the water for the veg get cold, or would you keep it boiling?’

‘I don’t cook. I microwave.’

‘I cook. You wouldn’t switch off the whole thing, specially not if your boyfriend was running late. You’d keep the water simmering, so you could throw in the veg the second he arrived.’

I say, ‘Our guy turned it off.’

‘Looks like. He didn’t want the smoke alarm going off.’

‘Soph. Can you print the wall switch of the cooker for me?’

‘No problem.’

‘You check for footprints in here?’

‘No, I let you two walk all over it first, to make my life more interesting,’ Sophie calls. ‘Footprints were the first thing we did. It rained off and on last night, so anyone who came in would’ve had wet shoes, but any prints dried up a long time ago – the heat in here – and they didn’t leave any decent residue. We got a few bits of dried mud, in here and in there; but those could’ve come from the uniforms clearing the scene, and there wasn’t enough for identifiable prints anyway.’