The Trespasser (39 page)

‘Nah.’ I’m not even gonna pretend to get all suspicious. He’s working hard for it, but I’m done playing Breslin’s game. ‘I’ve started; I’ll finish.’

‘Conway.’ Breslin switches the grin to mildly rueful. ‘This is me trying to show you that I do know who’s the boss of this investigation. If you need scut work done, I’m offering to do it.’

‘Thanks,’ I say. ‘I’m grand.’

After a moment Breslin shrugs. ‘Suit yourself.’ He has another skim through the e-mails, taking his time, and drops them back on my desk. ‘Moran? You need to get out of the office for a while?’ He turns Steve’s paperwork round to face him and has a good look. As far as I can tell, it’s Aislinn’s e-mail records, even though I would’ve sworn Steve was ignoring them up until Breslin came in.

‘Ah, no,’ Steve says. ‘I’m nearly done, sure. If I haven’t died of boredom by now . . .’

Breslin shrugs and shoves Steve’s stuff back to him. ‘Remember,’ he says, aiming a finger at me. ‘I made the offer.’

‘I will,’ I say. ‘Enjoy the exes.’

‘Yeah, I’m not getting my hopes up. You should see the first two.’ Breslin swings into his chair, makes oily phone calls setting up appointments, and sweeps out again. ‘And I don’t need backup today, either,’ he says, tossing me and Steve a wink on his way past. ‘If you catch my drift.’ We both pull out automated smiles.

‘What did he even come in for?’ Steve wants to know, when he’s gone. ‘He could’ve made those calls from anywhere.’

His voice still has some of that flat note to it, but he’s talking, which presumably should make me feel all warm inside. I say, ‘He couldn’t stay away from your pretty face.’

‘Seriously. He just wanted to check out what we’re doing. And try to take over the electronics. Again. What’s he scared we might find in there?’

I say, ‘I don’t care.’ And, when he opens his mouth again: ‘I
don’t care
.’

Steve rolls his eyes to the ceiling, shoves the e-mail records out of his way and goes back to whatever he’s really doing. I try to pick up where I left off, but my focus is shot; all the spam is blurring into one endless Viagra ad. My legs are twitching to get up and move.

The one thing that’s still kicking feebly inside my head: Lucy’s story about Aislinn’s secret boyfriend. That’s where all the gang bollix started, and now that we’ve cleared away the bollix, the story is still there and it still needs explaining. It occurs to me, which it should’ve done two days ago, that there are other reasons why Lucy could’ve been cagey. Maybe the boyfriend is a married guy she works with – Aislinn met Rory through Lucy, after all; if she met someone else too, there’s a decent chance it was the same way – and Lucy doesn’t want drama on the job if he finds out she dobbed him in. Or maybe, just like I thought at first, he never existed. I think about hauling Lucy out of her flat and going at her hard, so she can tell me the boyfriend story was revenge on one of Aislinn’s exes or a way to make sure we didn’t neglect any possibilities, and I can take this whole staggering wheezing sidetrack out back and put it out of its misery.

That’s when Steve’s head jerks up. ‘
Antoinette
,’ he says. He’s forgotten all about sulking.

‘What?’

He pushes a statement sheet across the desk. His eyebrows are halfway up his forehead.

I look down, where he’s pointing. The statement is one of his photocopies from the day before, an alibi from one of Desmond Murray’s taxi customers. The reporting officer’s signature is a scrawl, but the name typed underneath is Detective Garda Joseph McCann.

My eyes meet Steve’s. He says, very softly, ‘What the hell?’

Ireland is small, the pool of Ds is small, it would be weirder if there wasn’t at least one guy from the Desmond Murray case working Murder now. This explains why Gary was so keen for me to keep my mouth shut, anyway: if I go stirring up trouble, it’s gonna be close to home. Beyond that I can’t tell, through the last few months and the struggling light at the windows, whether this is another handful of nothing or whether it should set all my alarms screaming.

I say, ‘We need to check the rest of what you’ve got from that file. Give me half.’

We flip fast and with one eye on the door. That scrawl is everywhere. If we’d been in less of a rush, we would never have missed it yesterday: McCann, McCann, McCann. He didn’t get drafted in to give a hand with the initial push, like Gary did. He was right at the heart of this case.

Aislinn leaning over my desk, all big eyes and twisting fingers, going on about the detective who had patted her on the head and told her
You have great memories of him; we don’t want to change that, do we? Sometimes these things are better left as they are 
. . . That could have been McCann.

Steve is holding out a thick sheaf of pages, easily a third of what he started with. He says quietly, ‘All of these.’

‘Yeah,’ I say. I lift my own sheaf, the same size. ‘And these.’

Steve takes them out of my hand, tucks them back into the file and locks it away in his desk drawer, nice and easy. I’m not sure whether to slag him for paranoia or tell him to hurry up.

‘Here’s the big question,’ he says. ‘Have McCann and Breslin copped that Aislinn’s missing da was McCann’s missing person?’

I clasp my hands at the back of my neck to keep them still. None of the floaters are looking our way. ‘I don’t know. I was watching Breslin, when I told him that box was the missing-persons file. I’d swear he was relieved.
If
there’s something he doesn’t want us finding, it’s not that.’

‘You told him we’d looked through the file and found nothing good. Maybe he was relieved that we’d missed McCann’s name.’

‘Why? How would they even make the connection?’

‘Breslin’s telling McCann about our case, mentions the vic’s name . . .’

‘Like we said before: there’s got to be dozens of Aislinn Murrays out there. You honestly think McCann would remember a name as common as that? After seventeen years? She wasn’t even the missing person, or the family contact; she was just some little kid in the background.’

‘He worked the Desmond Murray disappearance hard,’ Steve says. ‘It could have stuck in his mind.’

‘So what if it did? There’s nothing dodgy about the disappearance; there’s not even
room
for anything dodgy. Why would they care if we link it up with our case?’

Steve is shaking his head. ‘Nothing dodgy, except the Ds not dropping the family a hint. Say Breslin and McCann know McCann screwed up there, yeah? Maybe they think it played into Aislinn getting killed, somehow. Or maybe it’s not even that: they just don’t want the screw-up coming out. So they’re trying to shove Rory Fallon down our throats and hope we swallow fast.’

Maybe it’s the fatigue, the heat and not enough coffee, wrapping layers of fuzz around my brain; I can’t tell whether the story rings true, or whether it just sounds good because Steve is putting a nice shape on it. He says, ‘It probably would’ve worked, too – if you hadn’t been working the Missing Persons desk that day, or if you didn’t have that memory on you. We might never even have found out about Desmond going missing, never mind Aislinn trying to track him down.’

I would love to believe it. If Breslin is messing with this case, not with us – meaning me – personally; if there are no gangs involved, no bent cops, just some dumb screw-up McCann made seventeen years ago and doesn’t want coming out now; then we’ve got the pair of them in a headlock, with a great chance at working out a deal that will make everyone very happy. For a second I can feel it, right through my body: the weight of the room lifting off me, the rush of strength hitting every cell like oxygen,
Let’s see you try and push me around now motherfuckers
. Me finally holding the high cards, ramming them so far up Roche’s hole that he’ll be spitting aces for months, and the Murder squad unfolding at long fucking last into the place I’ve dreamed of coming in to every morning.

Only I don’t believe it, no matter how hard I try. The room clamps back down around me – thick hot air, Reilly typing like he’s beating the keyboard into submission. It squeezes that strength right out of me, squashes it into a wad and tosses it away.

I say, ‘Yeah, that’d be fun. Only why would McCann and Breslin care? Maybe it wasn’t nice of the Ds to keep Evelyn Murray in the dark, but they were going by the book. What’s the worst that’s gonna happen to them if it comes out now? “Here’s a copy of the policy on victim sensitivity, have a read sometime”? It’s not like they’re gonna get reverted back into uniform, specially not after all this time.’

‘Depends on
why
they kept Evelyn in the dark. I don’t care what your man Gary says: that’s weird, Antoinette. It is. When you worked Missing Persons, did you ever do that to a family? Get an answer and walk away from them without one single hint? Ever?’

Steve’s head close to mine, and the squeezed-tight urgency in his voice: they feel idiotic, make me feel like a kid playing cops, with a cardboard badge and a bunch of gibberish learned off the telly. I shift away from him. ‘So? McCann wasn’t even the lead D. Even if there was a dodgy reason behind them making that call, the buck wouldn’t stop with him.’

Steve says, ‘How long’s McCann been married?’

‘Bernadette sent round a card for some anniversary, last year. Silver one, must’ve been. So?’

‘So he was married back when he was working this case. Gary said a lot of the Ds were smitten with Evelyn. What if that went further, for McCann? What if he was stretching out the case so he had an excuse to keep seeing her?’

The heat and the clacking keyboards are piling more fuzz onto my mind, thick as insulation. I picture grabbing Reilly’s keyboard and snapping it over my knee. ‘Only the case didn’t stretch out. They closed it as soon as they found Desmond.’

‘They did, yeah, officially at least – and we even said it was weird they didn’t do it sooner, remember? But maybe McCann told Evelyn he’d keep investigating in his free time, stay in touch, give her updates. Maybe there was actually something between them, maybe not; but either way, McCann might not want that coming out. His marriage isn’t in great shape, right? And he’s got a bunch of kids, hasn’t he? If the wife finds out he was using his job to chase Evelyn Murray, she could use that to—’

I say, before I know I’m going to, ‘Stop. Just stop.’

It comes out loud. One or two of the floaters lift their heads. I give them a snarl that smacks them straight back down again.

Steve is staring at me. He says, ‘What d’you mean?’

I say, and it takes everything I’ve got to hold my voice down, ‘All this shite is
imaginary
. Do you seriously not get that? Just about every single thing you’ve said since we got this case has been pulled straight out of your hole. Gangs and affairs and sweet Jesus Christ I don’t even know what—’

‘I’m coming up with theories,’ Steve says. He’s still staring. ‘That’s our
job
.’

‘Theories, yeah. Not fucking
fairy
tales.’

‘They’re not—’

‘They are, Moran. That’s all they are. Yeah, sure, all of it’s possible, but there’s not one iota of hard evidence for any of it. Here you are talking my ear off about Aislinn being a fantasist, coming up with stories to make herself feel better about her shite life: you’re doing
the same fucking thing
.’

Steve is biting down on his lip, shaking his head. I lean in closer, feeling the edge of the desk jam into my ribs, mashing the words into his face. ‘Rory Fallon killed Aislinn Murray because they had some stupid spat and he lost his temper. Breslin and McCann are fucking with me because they want me gone. Desmond Murray has nothing to do with any of it. There’s no thrilling hidden story here, Moran. There’s nothing that’s going to turn you into Sherlock Holmes tracking down the master criminal. You’re a scut-monkey working a shitty little lovers’ tiff, with your shitty squad giving you shite because they’re shiteholes. The end.’

Steve is white around the freckles and breathing hard through his nose. For a second I think he’s going to walk out, but then I realise it’s not humiliation; it’s anger. Steve is furious.

He starts to say something, but I point a finger right in his face. ‘Shut up. And I should’ve known that right from the start – I
did
know right from the start, only like a fucking fool I let myself get carried away by you and your pretty little story. If there’d been even a sniff of anything good off this case, we’d never have got within a mile of—’

Steve throws himself back in his chair. ‘Ah
Jaysus
, not this. “Everyone’s out to get me, the world is against me—” ’

‘Don’t you fucking—’

‘It’s like working with an emo teenager. Does nobody understand you, no? Are you going to slam your bedroom door and sulk?’

I can’t work out how he’s managed to live this long, whether he injects bleach into his ear every evening to burn the day out of his head and keep himself innocent. I say, ‘You fucking spoilt little brat.’ That widens Steve’s eyes. ‘All the imagination you’ve got going on, and you just can’t imagine that other people might not have it quite as easy as you.’

‘I
know
you don’t have it easy. I’m right here, remember? I see it every
day
. There are people who give you shite. That doesn’t mean that everything that ever happens is just an excuse to throw you to the wolves. You’re not that fucking important.’