The Trespasser (6 page)

‘Don’t remember. Something.’

‘Or nothing. Doesn’t take a lot to piss you off, when you’re in the humour.’

‘Fuck off, you.’

‘I like him,’ Sophie tells me. ‘You can keep him.’

Half my head is on where I’ve seen the vic before. My guard is down.

I duck under the tape, a voice recorder practically takes my eye out and a noise like an attack dog goes off in my face. I leap before I can stop myself, fists coming up, and hear the burst of fake shutter-clicks from a phone camera.

‘Detective Conway do you have a suspect was this a serial killer was the victim sexually assaulted—’

Mostly journalists are a good thing. We all have our special relationships – you throw your guy early tipoffs, he leaks whatever you want leaked and passes you anything you should know – but even with the rest, we usually get on grand: we all know the boundaries, no one oversteps, everyone’s happy. Louis Crowley is the exception. Crowley is a little snot-drip who works for a red-top rag called the
Courier
, which specialises in printing just a few too many details about rape cases, for readers who want more buzz of outrage or whatever else than they can get off the normal papers. His look is Poet Meets Pervert – floppy shirts and a dandruffy mac, wavy dark ponytail groomed over a big oily bald spot – and his face is permanently set on Righteous Offence. I’d rather brush my teeth with a chainsaw than tip off Crowley.

‘Did the killer stalk his victim should women in the area be taking precautions our readers deserve to know—’

Voice recorder in my face, phone clicking away in his other hand, waft of foul patchouli pomade off his hair – Crowley just about comes up to my nose. I manage not to shoulder the little bollix in the gob on my way past him; can’t be arsed with the paperwork. Behind me I hear Steve say cheerily, ‘No comment. No comment on the no comment. No comment on the no comment on the no comment.’

The cluster of kids scattering again, open-mouthed. The lace curtains vibrating. The hard chill of the air, after that overheated house. Crowley jerks his voice recorder back just in time, before I slam the car door on it. I reverse out into the road without looking behind me.

‘That little git,’ Steve says, shaking his jacket sleeves like Crowley dandruffed him. ‘That was quick. In time for the afternoon edition, and all.’

‘“Detectives Refuse to Deny Stalker Rumours. Detectives Baffled by Possible Serial Killer. Detectives: No Comment on Local Women’s Terror.” ’ I don’t even know where we’re going, we don’t have Lucy Riordan’s address, but I’m driving like we’re in a chase. ‘“Detectives Punch Shitty Excuse for Journalist in the Fucking Teeth.” ’

Over the last few months Crowley has been turning up at too many of my scenes, too fast. We have history – last year, he was trying to browbeat a quote out of a teenager who’d seen her drug-dealer da take two in the back of the head, I told him if he didn’t fuck off I’d arrest him for hindering my investigation, he flounced off making offended noises about police brutality and freedom of the press and Nelson Mandela – but it’s not like that puts me in a minority: half the force has told Crowley to fuck off, one way or another. There’s no reason he should pick me out for revenge, specially not all this time later. And even if his tiny mind has decided to fixate on me, that doesn’t explain how he’s finding out about my cases as soon as I do.

Journalists have ways they don’t tell us about, obviously. Crowley probably has a scanner that he tunes to police frequencies when he’s on duty, and uses to look for couples having phone sex the rest of the time. But still: I have to wonder.

You don’t make the Murder squad without having a world-class gift for finding creative ways to get under someone’s skin and wriggle around in there till they’d rip themselves open to get rid of you; without being ready and happy to do it, even if the witness you’re working on is a devastated kid sobbing her heart out for her da. I’m not the exception – and neither is Steve, much as he’d love to think he is. It’s not like I was shocked, the first time I realised that not all the lads save that talent for interviews. It gets to feel right on you, like the gun at your hip that leaves you lopsided when it’s not there. Some of the lads can’t put it down. They use it to get anything they happen to want, or to get past anyone who happens to be in their way. Or to break anyone they want broken.

Steve is keeping his trap shut, which is a good call. Without noticing, I’ve got us deep into Phoenix Park, probably because it’s the only place around where I can drive without getting snarled up in traffic and idiots. The roads are straight, between wide gentle meadows and rows of huge old trees, and I’m going like the clappers. The Kadett is about ready to have a fit of the vapours.

I slow down. Pull over, nice and neat, signalling well in advance and keeping one eye on my rear-view mirror.

‘We need Lucy Riordan’s address,’ I say. ‘I’ve got her mobile number.’

We pull out our phones. Steve dials his contact at one of the mobile networks and hits speaker; we listen to the even buzz of the ring. Deer watch us from under bare spreading branches. I realise I’m still wearing my shoe covers – I’m lucky they didn’t slide on the pedals and crash the car. I take them off and toss them in the back seat. The sunlight is still thin and warmthless; it still feels like dawn.

Chapter 2

Steve’s contact gives us a home address for Lucy Riordan in Rathmines, a work address at the Torch Theatre in town, and a birth date that makes her twenty-six. ‘Just gone half-nine,’ Steve says, checking his watch. ‘She should be home.’

I’m dialling my voicemail; I’ve got a new message, and I just can’t wait to hear it. ‘She’ll be sleeping off last night. Like anyone with sense, this time on a Sunday morning.’ The park is making me edgy. Outside the car windows the sky is dead, not one bird, and the massive trees feel like they’re slowly tilting inwards over us. ‘You head up the interview.’ Seeing as I don’t have a legit reason to arrest Crowley or punch him in the mouth, or to tell the gaffer where to shove his domestics, I’m gonna take the head off the first person who gives me half an excuse, and I don’t want it to be our key witness.

I didn’t use to be like this. I’ve always had a temper on me, but I’ve always kept it under control, no matter how hard I had to bite down. Even when I was a kid, I knew how to hold it loaded and cocked while I got my target in range, lined up my sights and picked my moment to blow the bastard away. Since I made Murder, that’s been changing – slowly, I never lose a lot of ground at once, but I never gain any back, and it’s starting to show. The last few months, I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve caught myself in the half-second before I splattered temper everywhere and stuck myself cleaning up the mess for the rest of my life. I wasn’t kidding about telling that witness he was too stupid to live: my mouth was opening to do it, when Steve came in with some soothing question. I know, dead certain, that someday soon neither of us is gonna catch me in time.

And I know, dead certain, that the rest of the squad is gonna be on that moment like sharks on chum. It’ll be blown up to ten times life-size and spread all round the force like it’s a full-frontal shot of me naked, and every day for the rest of my career someone will slap me in the face with it.

Murder isn’t like other squads. When it’s working right, it would take your breath away: it’s precision-cut and savage, lithe and momentous, it’s a big cat leaping full-stretch or a beauty of a rifle so smooth it practically fires itself. When I was a floater in the General Unit, fresh out of uniform, a bunch of us got brought in to do the scut work on a murder case, typing and door-to-door. I took one look at the squad in action and I couldn’t stop looking. That’s the nearest I’ve ever been to falling in love.

By the time I made it onto the squad, something had changed. The pressure level means Murder is balanced so finely that it only takes a few new heads to shift the whole feel of the squad: turn that big cat rogue and edgy, set that rifle warping towards its moment to blow up in your face. I came in at the wrong time, and I got off on the wrong foot.

Part of it was not having a dick, which apparently is the main thing you need to investigate murders. There’s been women on the squad before, maybe half a dozen of them over the years; whether they jumped or got pushed, I don’t know, but by the time I got there none of them were still around. Some of the guys figure that’s the natural order; they thought I had some cheek, swanning in like I had a right to be there, and I needed to be taught a lesson. Not all of them – most were fine, at least to start with – but enough.

They tested me, my first weeks on the squad, the same way a predator tests a potential victim in a bar: tossing out small stuff – worn-out jokes starting
Why is a woman like a
, comments about me being on the rag, hints about how I had to be pretty good at whatever I’d done to get this gig – to see if I’d force myself to laugh along. Checking, just like the predator checks, for the well-behaved one who’ll take the putdowns and the humiliation sooner than God forbid make a fuss; who can be forced, shove by shove, into doing whatever he wants.

Deep down, though, it wasn’t about me being a woman. That was just their in; that was just the thing that they thought would, or should, make it easy for them to push me around. Deep down, this was simpler. This was about the exact same thing as primary school, when Ireland was still lily-white and I was the only brownish kid around, and my first ever nickname was Shiteface. It was about the same thing as everything else humans have done to each other since before history began: power. It was about deciding who would be the alpha dogs and who would be at the bottom of the pile.

I went in expecting that. Every squad hazes the newbie – my first day on Missing Persons, they tried to send me door-to-door asking if anyone had seen Mike Hunt – and Murder was already growing a rep for doing it that bit harder, fewer laughs, more edge. But just because I expected it, that didn’t mean I was gonna take it. If I learned one thing in school, it’s this: you never let them get you on the bottom of the pile. If you do, you might never get up again.

I could have followed official policy and reported to my superintendent that I felt other officers were discriminating against me and creating a hostile workplace environment. Apart from the obvious – that would have been the perfect way to make things worse – I’d rather shoot my own fingers off than go running to the gaffer whining for help. So when this little shiteball called Roche slapped my arse, I nearly broke his wrist. He couldn’t pick up a coffee cup without wincing for days, and the message went out loud and clear: I wasn’t going to roll over, belly-up and wiggling and panting for whatever the big dogs wanted to do to me.

So they went shoulder to shoulder and started pushing me out of the pack. Subtle stuff, at first. Somehow everyone knew about my cousin who’s in for dealing smack. Fingerprint results never made it to me, so I never found out about the link between my case and a whole string of burglaries. One time I raised my voice at a lying alibi witness; nothing major, no worse than everyone else does all the time, but someone must have been watching behind the one-way glass, because it was months before I could interview a witness without the squad room wanting to know – just slagging, all a great big laugh –
Did you shout it out of him, Conway, bet you had him shiteing his kax, is he gonna get compensation for the hearing loss, the poor bastard’ll think twice before he agrees to talk to the cops again won’t he?
By this time even the guys who’d been grand were smelling the blood in the air around me, pulling back from trouble. Every time I walked into the squad room, I walked into a thud of instant, total silence.

Back then, at least I had Costello. Costello was the oldest inhabitant, it was his job to show newbies the ropes, and he was sound; no one was going to turn it up too high while Costello had his eye on me. A few months later, Costello retired.

In school I had my mates. Anyone who messed with me was messing with them too, and none of us was the type you wanted to mess with. When a rumour went round that my da was in prison for hijacking a plane, and half the class wouldn’t sit next to me in case I had a bomb, we tracked down the three bitches who had started it and beat the shite out of them, and that was the end of that. In Murder, once Costello went and until Steve came on board, I was all on my own.

Before the door closed behind Costello, the lads stepped it up. I left my e-mail open on my computer, came back to everything wiped: inbox, sent box, contacts, gone. Some of them refused to switch into interviews with me when it was time to shake things up,
You’re not sticking me with her, I’m not taking the blame when she fucks up
; or they needed every warm body for a big search, except mine, and sniggered
Couldn’t track an elephant through snow
just too loud on their way out the door. At the Christmas party, where I knew better than to have more than one pint, someone got a phone snap of me with my eyes half shut; it was on the noticeboard next morning, labelled ‘ALCOCOP’, and by the end of the day everyone knew I had a drink problem. By the end of the week, everyone knew I had got rat-arsed drunk, puked on my shoes and given someone – the name varied – a blowjob in the jacks. No way for me to know which one of the lads was behind it, or which two or five or ten. Even if I stick it out in the force till retirement, there’ll still be people who believe all that shite. As a rule I don’t give a fuck who thinks what about me, but when I can’t do my job because nobody trusts me enough to go near me, then I start caring.