The Trespasser (27 page)

Gaffney starts trying to come up with something grateful, but I’m already headed for the door. Behind me, I hear the click of Steve’s desk drawer locking, for whatever that’s worth.

Chapter 7

Me and Steve head for the car pool and our shitty Kadett. The web of laneways behind Dublin Castle is hopping: students dragging their hangovers towards Trinity College, business types talking too loud into too-big phones so we can all be blown away by their Bulgarian property deals, yummy mummies out for shopping sprees and skangers out for pickings. It feels good getting out onto the street, where any danger coming our way won’t be personal, and I hate that.

‘So,’ I say, once we’re a safe distance into the flow of people. ‘Breslin doesn’t want company today. He wants to be all on his ownio for those interviews.’

‘For the interviews,’ Steve says, sidestepping a couple having complicated relationship problems in Russian, ‘or for whatever else he’s doing. Not long before you got in, right? Breslin’s mobile rang. He had a look and got this face on him—’ Steve does a clamped jaw and flared nostrils: Breslin, pissed off and trying to cover it. ‘He took the call outside. But before he got all the way out the door, he said, “Don’t ring this phone.” ’

He’s right: maybe not the interviews. Maybe there’s something else Breslin has to do, or someone else he has to meet, along the way; something, or someone, that doesn’t need Gaffney. My adrenaline kicks.

‘You want to know what he did yesterday evening?’ I say. ‘He went schmoozing Sophie for the scene reports and Aislinn’s electronics.’

Steve’s eyebrows go up. I say, ‘It could mean nothing. I had a word with him: he says he was bored, went looking for something to do – and obviously he’s going to go after the thing that could turn him into the big hero here. But . . .’

‘But he wanted that stuff.’

‘Yeah. Badly enough to go behind our backs, even though he had to figure we’d find out.’

‘Did he get anything out of Sophie?’

‘Nah. There’s not a lot to get. Stains on Aislinn’s mattress, but even if we get DNA and it’s not hers, it could be years old; no way to know. It didn’t get there on Saturday night, anyway, or it’d be on the sheets as well, and they’re clean.’ The adrenaline is moving me at a clip that sends even the big-phone types dodging out of our way. ‘The only thing is, the places you asked Sophie to check, the bed frame and the jacks seat? They’re too clean. No prints, just smudges. Sophie says our guy could’ve wiped the place down—’

‘Ah, score!’ Steve does a fist-pump. ‘No reason why Rory would be wiping down the bed frame, when that was his first time in the house—’

‘Yeah yeah yeah, you’re a genius. Or Aislinn could’ve just been a clean freak. Sophie says it plays either way.’

Steve still looks pleased with himself. ‘Anything else?’

‘You mean that says Aislinn’s other fella was real?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Not so far. No sign of him on Facebook, not on her mobile, not on her e-mail.’ A junkie has cornered two lost-looking backpacker types and is hassling them for cash; I snap my fingers in his face and point off down the road, without bothering to break stride or find my ID, and he takes one look at us and bobbles off obediently. ‘
If
he exists, they must’ve made their appointments by ESP.’

‘Or Aislinn deleted all their messages,’ Steve points out. ‘Or he did. I’ve only started cross-checking the phone records, and I’m still waiting on the e-mails.’

‘Couple of interesting things on the laptop, though,’ I say. ‘Don’t get too overexcited, but Aislinn read up on a couple of gang cases. Francie Hannon and the guy with the tongue.’

Steve’s face has whipped round to me. ‘They were Cueball Lanigan’s boys. Both of them.’ I feel him get caught up by the same roller-coaster surge that’s speeding me along the footpath, feel the buzzing of the thing in our minds build higher. ‘And they were both Breslin’s cases. If he ended up in Lanigan’s pocket, right, and if Aislinn was seeing one of the gang and it went wrong, the first thing Lanigan would do—’

‘I told you not to get overexcited. I’ve put out feelers. If Aislinn was seeing someone from Lanigan’s crew, I’ll know soon enough.’ Steve looks a little wounded that I’m not opening up, but he’ll have to live with that. ‘The other good thing on her laptop: there’s a password-protected folder of pictures that she created in September. It’s labelled “Mortgage—” ’ Steve laughs out loud, and I can’t help a grin. ‘Yeah, that’s obviously bullshit. Sophie and her lot are still trying to crack the password; she’ll keep us updated.’

‘Did she tell Breslin about it?’

‘Nah. Neither did I. And I’m not planning to.’

Steve says, ‘So since September, Aislinn’s been worried about someone going through her laptop. That’s not Rory. She only met him in December, and he’d never been over to her place before.’

‘Maybe,’ I say. ‘Or else the folder’s full of naked selfies, and Aislinn wasn’t worried about anyone specific: she just didn’t want some junkie robbing her laptop and uploading her full-frontals.’

‘Naked selfies for who?’

‘For kicks, for a little extra income, left over from one of the exes, for someday when she’s old and wrinkly and wants to remember what a babe she was. How would I know?’

‘Or,’ Steve says, ‘it’s photos of her with her secret fella. And she really, really didn’t want anyone – including him – knowing she had them. Yet, anyway.’

I’ve been thinking the same thing. ‘Blackmail.’

‘Or insurance. If she was with a gangster, maybe she had just enough sense to know this could turn dangerous.’

‘“If,” ’ I say. ‘From now on, every time you say “if” about this case, you owe me a quid. I’ll be rich by the weekend.’

‘I thought you liked a challenge,’ Steve says, grinning. ‘Admit it: you hope I’m right.’

‘I do, yeah. That’d make a nice change.’

‘You do.’

We’ve slowed down behind a pair of gabbing old ones. I say, ‘I’d only love this to come through.’

I’ve been trying not to say it out loud because I don’t want to jinx it. Like a dumb kid; like one of those moaners who believe the universe has it in for them and everything is just looking for an excuse to turn to shite. I’ve never been that. This is new, it’s stupid, it comes from the squad training me to look for booby traps everywhere – last week I left my coffee in the squad room while I went for a piss, came back and nearly had it to my mouth before I saw the floating gob of spit – and no way in hell am I gonna blab it to Steve. I don’t fucking like being what anyone trains me to be; I don’t like it at all. I keep walking and count tall guys in dark overcoats.

Steve says, ‘But?’

‘But nothing. I don’t want to get too attached to the idea till we’ve got some actual evidence, is all.’

He starts to say something, but I’m done with that. ‘Here’s the other thing,’ I say, dodging around the old ones and picking up the pace again. ‘Remember I said I had a word with Breslin about ringing Sophie?’

‘Oh, Jaysus. Will he live?’

‘Ah, yeah. His makeup’ll cover the bruises.’

‘You were nice to him, right? Tell me you were nice to him.’

‘Relax the kacks,’ I say. ‘Everything’s grand. That’s the interesting part. I wasn’t nice to him – I was busting his balls on purpose – but he just kept on being nice to me.’

‘So maybe he wasn’t bullshitting us, last night.’ Steve is trying on the idea for size and stretching hard to make it fit. ‘Maybe he genuinely does think we’re all right.’

‘You think? I called him a cheeky little bollix who was getting above himself, and I said while he’s on my investigation he needs to do what I tell him.’ Steve lets out a snort of horrified laughter. ‘Yeah, well, I wanted to see what he would do. I expected him to take my head off. But you know what he did? He sighed and said OK, grand, from now on he’ll run things past me.’

Steve has stopped laughing. I say, ‘Does that sound like Breslin to you?’

After a moment he says, ‘It sounds like Breslin really wants to stay on speaking terms with us. Like, badly.’

‘Exactly. And that’s so he can keep track of what we’re at; it’s not because he’s got faith in us to turn into lovely little team players, or whatever it was. When I found him, right? He was having a chat with McCann, and they shut up sharp when they saw me. Breslin gave me some crap about McCann’s marriage problems, but I’m pretty sure they were discussing the quickest way to get rid of me.’

Steve shoots me a look I can’t read. ‘You figure? What did they say?’

I lift one shoulder. ‘I didn’t give enough of a shit to memorise it. McCann wasn’t happy, Breslin was reassuring him that he’d have some woman sorted in no time and everything would go back to normal, McCann wanted him to hurry it up. That was the gist of it.’

‘And you’re positive it couldn’t actually have been about McCann’s wife?’

‘It could’ve been. But it wasn’t.’

Some wanker with a logo jacket and a clipboard bounds up to us, opens his mouth, takes a second look and backs off. I’m getting my mojo back. Two days ago he would probably have followed me down the street, badgering me for money to end Third World psoriasis and telling me to smile.

‘OK,’ Steve says. ‘We’ve been wondering if Breslin could be bent—’ Even this far from the job, both of us automatically glance over our shoulders. ‘What if it’s McCann?’

I didn’t even think of that. For a second I feel like a fool – letting paranoia distract me from the real stuff – but that blows away on the rising rush of excitement: that bad dare, growing bigger.

‘That could work.’ I’m skimming through what I know about McCann. From Drogheda. A wife and four teenage kids. Not from money, not like Breslin – I remember him saying something sour, once, about cutting the crime rate to zero by making all the spoilt brats with their smartphones go into apprenticeships at fourteen, the way his da did. No Bank of Mum and Dad to fall back on if the car dies, the house needs re-roofing, the kids need college fees and a D’s salary isn’t cutting it. A gang boss looking for a pet would like McCann a lot. ‘Or both of them.’

‘No wonder Breslin took everything you could dish out,’ Steve says. ‘He can’t afford to have us telling the gaffer we want rid of him.’

‘If,’ I say. ‘If any of this is real.’

‘If,’ Steve says. ‘How did you leave things with Breslin?’

‘I apologised. Told him I was too intimidated by his awesomeness to think straight. He liked that.’

‘You think he believed you?’

I shrug. ‘I don’t really care. If he didn’t, he just thinks I’m a narky bitch, and he thought that anyway. He was looking for an excuse to be buddies with me again; I gave him one. We’re good.’

We’re at the car pool. Just in that short walk, I’ve spotted eleven tall guys in dark overcoats. Every one made me feel more like a paranoid idiot, but the whole bunch of them can’t scrub away the prickle of warning when I think of the guy at the top of my road.

Steve says, in the gateway, ‘What do we do?’

What we need to do, just for starters, is pull Breslin’s and McCann’s financials, pull their phone records, and have someone turn their computers inside out to find out if they’ve been accessing anything they shouldn’t be. None of which is gonna happen. ‘Keep working our case. Keep talking to them. Keep our mouths shut.’ I wave to the guy who runs the car pool; he waves back and turns to look for the Kadett’s keys. ‘And I’m gonna see if I can make Breslin eat a bug.’

Aislinn’s gaff has been processed hard. When there’s someone coming home to a place, we try not to wreck it too badly – print dust gets wiped away, books go back on shelves – unless we actually want to shake people up; but when no one’s coming home, we don’t bother breaking out the sensitivity. Sophie’s lot covered half the house in black print dust and the other half in white, carved away a rough rectangle of carpet where Aislinn’s body was lying, sawed a long chunk out of the fireplace surround, stripped the bed and sliced gaping holes out of the mattress. In a cosy messy family home that stuff looks nightmarish, against nature, but Aislinn’s house barely looked like a real person’s gaff to start with; now it looks like a Tech Bureau teaching unit.

Steve takes the sitting room and the bathroom, I have the kitchen and the bedroom. It’s quiet. Steve whistles to himself, and the odd sound trickles in from the street outside – a bunch of old ones happily bitching their way past, a kid howling – but not a squeak or a bump out of the neighbours; these old walls are thick. Unless there was a blazing row or a scream, there’s no way the neighbours would have heard anything. A stealth boyfriend, one who’d been to her place before, he would’ve known that.

The search gives me nothing relevant. Your standard hiding places – packet of peas in the freezer, emptied-out canister in the spice rack, under the mattress, inside shoes – are blank. No love notes in the curly-wurly dressing table, no spare pair of morning-after boxers in the chest of drawers. In the wardrobe, no envelope of cash or package of brown waiting to be picked up; the best I come up with is a bunch of family photo albums shoved to the back of the top shelf, behind the spare duvet. I take a look, see if they give me any hints on where I saw Aislinn before, but no. She wasn’t a good-looking kid: chunky, with skinned-back plaits, a bumpy forehead and an uncomfortable smile. For someone who put this much gym time and celery and hair products into looking the way Aislinn looked, that would be plenty of reason to hide the albums. There’s no family pics up around the gaff, either; pukey fabric-prints of flowers and gingham chickens go on her walls, but her family goes at the back of the wardrobe. A shrink would love that – Aislinn wanted to bury her parents as revenge for abandoning her, or she had to bury her real self so she could reinvent herself as Dream Date Barbie – but all I care about is that no one else in any of the photos looks familiar. Wherever I saw Aislinn, her gaff isn’t gonna give me any hints.