The Trespasser (58 page)

I say, ‘And so her plan changed.’

Lucy laughs, one sharp breath. ‘You know the first thing I thought, when she showed up on my doorstep sobbing her heart out and kicking the walls?
At least it’s over. Thank God.
I didn’t say that to Ash till I had her calmed down – which took forever; I had to listen to the whole story three or four times over, every detail, she couldn’t stop telling me. But finally I got a shot of whiskey and a cup of tea into her – I mean, she looked like she could’ve used a massive spliff or a Valium or something, but I didn’t have any and I just knew sweet tea for shock, right? It worked, anyway: she was still raging, but she settled down enough that at least she could sit still and she was only crying off and on, and I could get a word in edgewise. So I said, “Look, the only good thing is that now you know. Now you can leave it. Like you said.”

‘Ash practically came up off the sofa. Her hands were—’ Lucy’s hands shoot up, rigid claws. ‘I thought she was going to go for me, or dig her nails into her own face, I didn’t know whether to grab her before she could . . . But she went, “You think I’m going to fucking leave this?” – Ash doesn’t swear. “I’m not done. I’m nowhere near— I’m going to
get that fucker
. He thought he had the right to decide my life – no. No. No. I’m not going to just lie down and take it, yes sir whatever you want sir do it to me harder sir—
Fuck
him.” She was so angry she was panting, but it was a different kind of angry from before. She looked
dangerous
. Ash, like; the least dangerous person in the world. Her voice was wrecked from crying, this hard hoarse voice that didn’t even sound like her – she said, “Now I’m going to do it to him. I’m going to make the rest of his life into
whatever the fuck I want
.”

‘I went, “OK, hang on, what?” And Ash said, “He’s already half in love with me. I’m going to get him the rest of the way there. Then I’m going to convince him to leave his wife and get a divorce so that he and I can be together. I’m going to make him tell her all about me, so there’s no way she’ll ever take him back. And then I’m going to dump him.” ’

And there it is, the one piece me and Steve couldn’t find: why Aislinn wanted McCann. ‘Jesus Christ,’ I say. ‘There’s no way that was going to end well.’

‘I
know
that. I
told
her that. In those exact words.’

‘I thought Aislinn was good at people.’

Lucy says, ‘She
is
. That’s what freaked me out the most. In order to come up with a fucking looper idea like that one, she had to have completely lost hold of everything she knew about how people work. She was so obsessed with the story in her head, the fact that there were actual people involved wasn’t even a factor any more.’

She reaches for her smoke packet, not to open it, just to have something in her hands. ‘I tried to wake her up. I said, “I thought Joe wasn’t the type to have affairs.” And Ash said, “He isn’t. I can get past that. It won’t be that hard; he’s always dropping little hints about how he and his wife are basically staying together out of habit and he loves her but he’s not in love with her, blah blah clichés. Which is just him trying to convince us both that it’s totally fine for us to be going for drives together, but I can use it. I’ll make him think he’s the brave romantic hero breaking out of his meaningless marriage and turning himself into something special by following True Love. Him telling my mum that
he’d
never leave his wife and kids,
never
, the sanctimonious
fuck
, and all the time he knew— I’ll have him dumping her by Christmas. Just watch me.” ’

I say, ‘Being blunt here: she was planning on shagging his brains out till he couldn’t think straight.’

That makes Lucy blink, but she says evenly, ‘Yeah. She was.’

‘Not everyone would be on for that.’ Which is putting it mildly. There are plenty of undercovers, trained professionals, who won’t shag the targets. For a civilian, Aislinn was hardcore.

Lucy moves on the sofa, like a spring is sticking into her. ‘Ash was weird about some things,’ she says. ‘Sex, love, all that. She was all into reading romantic books that ended happy-ever-after, but when it came to her own life: no way. She said – ever since we were kids, she said it, and she meant it – that she was never going to fall in love. She went out with a couple of guys, but that was just for the experience – she didn’t want to be thirty and a virgin who didn’t know what a date felt like. The second the guys seemed like they might be getting serious, Aislinn broke it off.’

‘Because of her dad,’ I say. ‘And her ma.’

‘Yeah. She said look what it does to you, falling in love. Just look. It means someone else has hold of your whole life. At any second, like
that
’ – a snap of her fingers – ‘they could decide to change it into something else. You might never even know why. And you might never get it back, your life. They could just walk out and take it with them, and it’s gone for good.’

Lucy’s eyes are on nothing and her voice has changed, lightened and tightened: Aislinn’s voice, quick and urgent, running under her own. She’s remembering. For that second I want to nod to her – to Aislinn, not Lucy; that nod across a crowded room to the person you peg as a cop, to the only other woman there, to the only person dressed in your same style. The nod that says, whether you like each other or not,
You and me, we get it.

Lucy says, ‘I mean, I thought she was doing exactly that anyway: letting her parents have her life. She was going to deliberately miss out on falling in love, because of what they did. But Ash said I didn’t get it. She said this was
her
; her own decision. She was right, I didn’t exactly get it, but I did get that the idea of shagging Joe . . . it didn’t mean the same thing to Aislinn as it would to most people. Sex wasn’t something she was hoping would be special, or mind-blowing; she specifically
didn’t
want it to be. And this, getting Joe, this was the most important thing in her life. So if sex could help her do it, why not?’

‘Well,’ I say. ‘You said she’d never hurt anyone. This plan was going to hurt Joe’s wife, and his kids. A lot.’

Lucy turns the smoke packet between her fingers. ‘I know. I said that to her, that day. I thought it would stop her for sure.’

‘Why didn’t it?’

She shakes her head. ‘It should’ve. When I said Ash wouldn’t hurt anyone, I wasn’t just being sappy, trying to make her into a saint because she’s . . . dead. She genuinely was like that.’ She turns the smoke packet faster. This is jabbing at her. ‘I don’t know. Yeah, she was obsessed, but still, I couldn’t believe . . . But she just stared at me. Like I was talking gibberish. I still don’t get it.’

But I get it. Lucy’s right: Aislinn had got good at tangling people in her stories, building the relentless current that drew them in deeper and deeper, tugged them step by step towards the ending she could see waiting misty and beckoning on the far shore. She had got too good: in the end she tangled herself. By the time Lucy pointed out McCann’s wife and kids, it was too late for Aislinn to pull free. Her own current had grown too strong for her. It wound around her ankles, her knees, rising, and it dragged her downstream to a shore she never saw waiting.

Lucy says, ‘She’d wiped her face on her dress. This flowy pink dress that she’d bought specially for the big day, to make her look sexy and adorable and harmless and everything that would make Joe more likely to spill his guts – she’d spent two hundred quid on it – and she’d been smearing the skirt across her face like it was a tissue. It was covered in mascara and foundation and tears and snot. And all of a sudden Ash looked down like she was only noticing, and she went, “Jesus, what a mess! I’ll have to get this dry-cleaned. Joe likes it; I’ll need it again.” And she found a tissue and started dabbing at the worst bits. Like she’d spilled tea on it, or something. She wasn’t angry any more, or crying; it was like none of that had ever happened.’

‘What did you do?’

‘I begged her to please, please just give it a few days before she did anything. I thought once she got over the shock, she’d realise this was a terrible idea in like a hundred ways. I
begged
her.’ Lucy’s hand’s clamped around the cigarette packet, and her voice has started to rise. She drives it back down to normal. ‘But Ash – I swear she didn’t even hear me. She got the worst of the crap off her dress, and then she found her phone and Hailoed a taxi. Then she got up and gave me a hug – a long hug, tight – and she said, right in my ear, “When I dump him, I’m going to tell him it’s for his own good.” And then she left.’

I say, ‘And she didn’t give herself a few days to get over it.’

‘Inside a week,’ Lucy says, ‘she’d slept with him. I don’t know how she convinced him. She said it wasn’t hard; she made him think it was his idea, and she was the one who needed convincing. And afterwards she got upset – not too upset, just prettily tearful – because she was scared he’d hate her for getting carried away and doing such a terrible thing to his marriage, and she’d never see him again. So he got to reassure her that it wasn’t her fault and he’d never think less of her and never leave her and his marriage was a mess anyway and blah blah blah. It all went perfectly.’ There’s a savage twist on the last word.

‘And?’ I ask. ‘How’d the relationship go after that?’

Lucy flips open her smoke packet and pulls out another, glancing at me for permission; this is getting harder. I nod.

She says through the cigarette, tilting her head to the lighter, ‘Well. The first thing was they stopped going for drives up the mountains, which was kind of a relief, except that instead he’d call round to Ash’s house and they’d . . . stay there. Which wasn’t a relief.’ She tosses the lighter on the table and pulls hard on the smoke.

‘How often were they meeting?’

‘Same as before: maybe once a week, maybe two or three times. They didn’t have a routine. Joe said he had to play it by ear, to make sure his wife didn’t suspect anything.’

‘So he wasn’t planning on ending his marriage,’ I say.

‘Not yet, he wasn’t,’ Lucy says dryly. ‘But Aislinn was getting him there. The second thing was that he started buying her presents. Only tiny ones – a little china cat with a checked bow when he saw she had checked stuff in her kitchen, things like that – because his wife looked after the money and she noticed every euro, she’d have been on it like a bonnet if Joe had bought anything big. But he kept going on about how he’d love to buy her a diamond necklace, and take her to Paris because she’d said she wanted to travel . . . And Ash said it wasn’t just talk; he meant it. So she fed it. Told him how she’d always dreamed about having a diamond necklace, and printed off pictures of cheesy places they could visit in Paris.’

I think about the high frustrated yammer coming out of McCann’s phone, again and again and on and on, while the squad lads mime whipcracking and McCann tries to disappear into his chest. A girl who acted like every word out of his mouth was pure perfection would have made a nice change. I remember that fugly china cat, pride of place on Aislinn’s kitchen windowsill.

‘The third thing,’ Lucy says, ‘was that at the end of October –
October
; that’s three months after they
met
– Joe told Aislinn he loved her.’

The fucking idiot. ‘I’d say she was pleased with that,’ I say.

‘Over the moon. She brought me out for champagne to celebrate. I didn’t exactly feel like celebrating, but I went anyway, because . . .’ Lucy leans her head back on the sofa and watches the smoke trickle out of her cigarette. ‘I missed her,’ she says. ‘We were seeing a lot less of each other. Aislinn felt like she could never make plans, in case
Joe
wanted to call round. We weren’t even talking any more, not properly. I mean, we rang each other, we texted each other, but it was all stupid stuff: are you watching this on the telly, did you hear this song . . . Nothing that mattered.’

She’s still watching the curls of smoke ooze through the cold air, not looking at me. ‘We were losing hold of each other,’ she says. ‘Just little by little, but there was nothing I could do to stop it, and I knew if this didn’t end soon . . . All Ash could talk about was Joe, and I didn’t want to hear the gory details. What I did hear, I didn’t like.’

I say, ‘Like what?’

‘Like,’ Lucy says. Her head moves against the sofa. ‘She still didn’t have Joe’s phone number, you know that? He’s all in
love
with her, he wants to drink wine with her in a café in Montmartre, but give her his phone number: oh, Jesus, no. He’d only ever rung her once, the day after we met him, and that was from a blocked number. After that, when he wanted to see her, he’d leave a note at her house. And then – get this – when they met up, he’d make her hand the note back to him so he could destroy it.’

But once Aislinn got stuck into her brilliant new plan, she started taking photos of the notes for her secret stash, before she handed them over like a perfect obedient mistress. McCann thought he was on everything, the big bad Murder D running a watertight operation. He underestimated Aislinn by light-years.

‘Thorough,’ I say.

‘That’s not thorough. That’s fucked up. What kind of person even thinks of something like that?’