The Trespasser (55 page)

I take the shitty sofa. ‘I’m going to tell you some stuff I’ve been thinking,’ I say. ‘I don’t want you to tell me whether I’m right or wrong till I’m done talking. I don’t want you to say anything at all. I just want you to listen. OK?’

‘I’ve told you everything I’ve got to tell.’

‘Just listen. OK?’

She shrugs. ‘If you want.’ She makes a thing of settling herself back into her sofa, cross-legged, mug nested in her lap, ready to humour me.

I can play that game too. I rearrange cushions, shift my arse on my bockety sofa, find the best angle to stretch out my legs. Lucy winds tighter, wanting me to get on with it.

‘So,’ I say, when I’m good and comfortable. ‘Let’s start with your friendship with Aislinn. You two were a lot closer than you tried to make out. Her phone records say you guys talked or texted basically every day. You were proper friends; best friends.’

Lucy pokes her coffee with her fingertip, scoops out a speck of something and examines it. The solid black of her against the blue-and-rust-striped Mexican blankets, and the white-blond forelock falling in her white face, make her hard to see, like a blank spot in the middle of my vision.

‘So there has to be a reason you didn’t want us knowing that, on Sunday. And the point when you started claiming you and Aislinn weren’t close was when you told us about her secret fella. Which has to mean three things. A, you know more about him than you let on. B, you’re scared of him; you don’t want him finding out you know anything. And C, you think he might find out through us.’

One blink, on the word
scared
. She rubs her fingertip clean on the edge of the cup.

I say, ‘Me and my partner, at first we wondered if Aislinn was going out with some gangster.’ The way Lucy’s face closes down would tell me, if I didn’t already know, how far off target that was. ‘It took us till last night to click. Aislinn’s married fella wasn’t a gangster. He was a cop.’

The silence stays. I’m better at leaving it than Lucy; more practice. In the end she moves. ‘Is that it?’

‘Yeah. Your turn.’

‘For what? I’ve got nothing to say.’

‘You do. I can see exactly why you’re scared’ – that blink again – ‘but if you wanted to keep your mouth shut, you would’ve. You told us Aislinn was seeing someone on the side because you wanted us to track him down. You didn’t want to get in too deep; you were hoping that, if you pointed us in the right direction, we’d get there on our own. And we have.’

Lucy’s eyes are still on her coffee. She says, ‘Then you don’t need me.’

‘If we didn’t, I wouldn’t be here. I’m pretty sure I know who Aislinn was seeing. I’m pretty sure I know who killed her. But I can’t prove any of it.’

‘Or you’re saying that because you want to find out how much I know.’

I say, ‘You want to hear something I haven’t told anyone? We’ve got lockers, at work. A couple of months back, someone jimmied mine open and pissed in it. All over my running gear and half a dozen interviews’ worth of notes.’

Lucy doesn’t look up, but I catch the flick of her lashes: she’s listening. I say, ‘Here’s the part that matters. Murder works separate from the other squads; there’s no one else in our building. And the locker room has a combination lock on it. One of my own squad did that.’

She looks up then. ‘Why?’

‘Because they don’t like me. They want me out. That’s not important. The point is, this isn’t the telly, where cops are all blood brothers and anyone who gets on the wrong side of a cop ends up dead in a ditch while the rest of us lose the evidence. I don’t have any squad loyalty. I’m not here to clean up anyone’s mess. I’m just working my case. Anyone gets in my way, cop or not, I’ve got no problem running him down.’

‘That’s supposed to reassure me?’

‘If I was just here to shut your mouth, I would’ve done it by now. One way or another. I already know you know something; if I didn’t want it coming out, I wouldn’t need the details.’

For a second I think I’ve got through, but then Lucy’s face shuts down again. She says flatly, ‘You’re better at this than I am. I know that. I’ve got no chance of figuring out whether you’re telling me the truth.’

I take out my phone, find Aislinn’s fairy tale and pass it across the table to Lucy. ‘Here,’ I say. ‘I think this is for you.’

I’m hoping to God it won’t break her down again, because I don’t have time to stick her back together today, but Lucy’s made of tough stuff. She has to bite down on her lips once, and when she looks up at me her eyes are too shiny, but she’s doing her sobbing in private now.

I say, ‘That’s Aislinn’s handwriting. Right?’

‘Yeah.’

‘And it’s meant for you.’

‘Yeah. It is.’

I say, ‘I don’t understand all of it, but I get this much: if the story doesn’t have a happy ending, you’re supposed to tell me the rest. I think this qualifies as a pretty shitty ending.’

That gets something like a laugh, helpless and raw. ‘Carabossa and Meladina,’ Lucy says. ‘When we were kids, and Aislinn used to make up stories about us having crazy adventures, those were our names. I can’t even remember where they came from. I should have asked her.’

I say, ‘If I wanted this story kept under wraps, I wouldn’t have brought you that. You’re right, there are detectives who’d try to bury the whole thing. You didn’t get them. You got me.’

Lucy’s touching the phone screen, just lightly, two fingertips. ‘Can I have this?’ she asks. ‘Could you send it to me, or print it out for me?’

‘Right now it’s evidence. I can’t go passing it around. Once the case is over, yeah, I’ll get you a copy. I promise.’

Lucy nods. ‘OK. Thanks.’

I hold out my hand. She takes one more moment with that message; then she catches a small tight breath and straightens her back. ‘Yeah,’ she says, and passes me the phone. ‘The guy Aislinn was seeing was a Guard. A detective.’

Flash of her eyes, checking my reaction. I ask, ‘Did you ever meet him?’

‘Yeah. The same night Aislinn did. I wasn’t going to let her—’

‘Hang on,’ I say. ‘One step at a time. Do you think you could identify him?’

‘Yeah. Definitely.’

I open my satchel and find the Breslin photo array. ‘OK,’ I say. ‘If you see the man who Aislinn was going out with, I want you to tell me. If he’s not there, or you’re not sure, say so. Ready?’

Lucy nods. She’s bracing herself for his face.

I pass her the card. She scans; then her face goes blank with bafflement. ‘No. He’s not here.’

What the fuck? ‘Take your time,’ I say. ‘Are you sure?’

‘I’m positive. None of these guys look anything like him. At all.’ Lucy almost shoves the card back at me. She’s gone wary again, wondering what I’m playing at. I’d swear it’s real.

In the moment as I bend to put the card back in my satchel – wondering wildly where the hell I go from here, wishing I’d brought Steve – it hits me.

I pull out the other photo array, the McCann one. ‘Try these guys,’ I say. ‘Do you recognise any of them?’

It takes less than a second: the scan, the quick burst of breath through her nose, the clamp of tension grabbing her whole body. ‘Him,’ Lucy says quietly, and her finger comes down on McCann. ‘That’s him.’

‘The man Aislinn was seeing.’

‘Yeah.’

‘How sure are you?’

‘A hundred per cent. That’s him.’

‘Write it down,’ I say, passing her a pen. ‘At the bottom of the sheet. Which number you recognise, and where you recognise him from. Sign and date it. Then initial beside the photo you’re identifying.’

She writes neatly, steadily; only the fast rise and fall of her chest and the slight huff of her breath give away that her adrenaline’s running wild. Mine is too. The big mystery about why McCann was hanging around Viking Gardens for weeks: gone. Aislinn’s neighbour thought the guy climbing the wall was fair-haired, but yellow half-light from a streetlamp would turn McCann’s grey streaks fair. The phone calls from McCann’s wife giving him grief about missing another dinner, the slump to his back while Breslin promised to get rid of me, the state of him the last few days, it all fits.

The only piece that still won’t drop into place is why the hell Aislinn wanted McCann; what the hell me and Steve have been missing, all along.

Lucy passes me back the photo array. ‘Is that OK?’

‘Yeah,’ I say, giving it a quick read. ‘Thanks. Now you can tell me the story.’

She takes a breath. ‘What do you want to know?’

‘All of it. Start from the beginning.’

‘OK.’ Lucy wipes her hands down her thighs – rubbing away sweat or the feel of that photo, I can’t tell. ‘OK. OK. I guess the beginning was maybe seven or eight months after Ash’s mum died – so about two and a half years ago? Ash and I were out for a pint, and she said, “Guess what I’m going to do.” She was ducking her head down and looking up at me like this, out of the corner of her eye, this bashful little smile – for a second I thought she was going to get a nipple piercing or something . . .’ Lucy laughs, a small dry sound. ‘If only. But then she said, “I’m going to find out what happened to my dad.” Which was the last thing I expected. She was always making up stories about where he was, or the ways he might come back; but she’d never talked about actually tracking him down.’

I say – I can sound as empathetic as anyone – ‘Maybe she didn’t feel able to do it while her mam was alive. Looking after her would’ve taken all of Aislinn’s energy; I’m not surprised she had none left for her da.’

Lucy’s nodding fast. ‘That’s what I figured. I thought it could be a good idea – not finding him, specifically; there were too many ways that could go pear-shaped. But this was the first time she’d ever come up with a plan to go after something she wanted. I thought that had to be good, for her to learn how to do that. Right? That makes sense, right?’

‘Total sense,’ I say – and I actually mean it – and watch the relief rush through Lucy. ‘She wasn’t going to get a lot out of life till she did.’

‘Exactly. So I said great idea, fair play to you. Aislinn told work she had a dentist appointment, dressed up in her best gear, and went in to the Missing Persons squad. They gave her the runaround at first, but finally this detective looked up her dad on some computer system and said he was dead. Aislinn was . . .’ Lucy bites down on her lips, remembering. ‘God. She was devastated. She rang work and said the anaesthetic had made her feel faint and she couldn’t come in, and then she went home and cried all day. I went over there after work, and she looked like roadkill. Everything had gone out of her; she was just . . . lost.’

This is the part where I should probably feel bad: my callousness turning poor Aislinn’s story down the path towards tragedy, blah blah blah. Yesterday, I would have felt fuck-all. Like I said to Steve: if she wanted to hook her life onto some guy who wasn’t even around, that was her problem. But today, I don’t know what it is. All of a sudden it feels like there were so many people nudging Aislinn from every direction: me, Gary, her ma, her da, on and on, all those fingers poking, shoulders barging, everyone shoving her life whatever way happened to suit them. It makes my skin leap like flies are covering it. And finally someone didn’t bother nudging: her life didn’t suit him, and he punched it right out.

Lucy says, ‘I was scared she’d go back to just drifting along, you know? That this had been her one chance at actually getting hold of her life, and now it had been smashed like that, she’d never give it another go. So I said, like a fucking
idiot
, I said, “Maybe someone who worked on the case could tell you what happened to him.” I was only trying to make Ash feel better. I just wanted to give her something to go after.’

That appeal is back in her eyes. ‘Sounds right to me,’ I say. ‘That’s probably exactly what I would’ve said.’

‘I should’ve kept my stupid mouth shut. But at the time, I actually thought I’d done the perfect thing. Aislinn stopped crying, just like that, and dived for her phone. I went, “What?” and she said I’d just reminded her of something the Missing Persons guy had said. He’d mentioned the names of the detectives who were in charge of the case, when her dad first went missing. Detective Feeney and Detective McCann.’

Hearing the name in her voice touches the back of my neck, one icy drop. I say, ‘And?’

Lucy says, ‘She Googled them. She found Detective Feeney’s obituary – she only vaguely recognised the photo, but it said he’d spent twenty-three years in Missing Persons, so she knew it had to be him. So that was a dead end. But Detective McCann . . . it took Ash a while to find anything on him, but finally she came up with a news video of him leaving court after some murder case – so she knew he was on the Murder squad now. And him she recognised straightaway. She’d forgotten his name – she just knew it was McSomething – but she remembered him spending a fair bit of time at her house, trying to talk her mum down. And she remembered him patting her on the head and saying, “Sometimes things are better off left. You’ve got great memories of your daddy, don’t you? We wouldn’t want to change that.” Aislinn kept saying, “That has to mean he knows something, doesn’t it? He definitely knew something.” I said maybe, maybe not, maybe he was just trying to make you feel better about them
not
knowing anything, right? But she wouldn’t let go of it. For weeks, that was all she talked about. Finally I was like, “For fuck’s sake, just track down the guy and ask him.” ’