Authors: Tana French
Rory signs without reading. ‘Thanks,’ Breslin says, through a yawn and a pec-display stretch. ‘I need real coffee, not that instant rubbish. Rory? Antoinette? What’ll I get you?’
Normally I’d smack down the ‘Antoinette’ crap, but I know what he’s at. ‘Oh God, yeah, real coffee,’ I say. ‘Black, no sugar. And see if you can find a couple of biscuits, would you? I’m starving.’
‘I’ll raid O’Gorman’s stash,’ Breslin says, grinning. ‘He buys the good stuff; no Rich Tea nonsense there. Rory, what’ll you have?’
‘Um, I—’ A baffled blink while Rory tries to chase down the potential implications of hot drinks. ‘Tea would be— No, coffee. With a bit of milk. Please.’
‘Your wish is my command,’ Breslin says, and hauls himself out of his chair with a groan. ‘I could sleep for a week. It’s this bloody weather. One decent bit of sunshine and I’d be a new man.’
‘Have a look through O’Gorman’s desk, while you’re at it,’ I say. ‘See if he’s got a couple of tickets to Barbados in there.’
‘If he does, we’re out of here. Rory, got your passport?’ Rory manages to catch up and find a laugh, a few seconds too late. Breslin throws us both a grin on his way out the door.
I lean back in my chair, stretching out my legs in front of me, and pull out my hair elastic to redo my bun while we wait. ‘Oof,’ I say. ‘Long few days. How’ve you been getting on?’
‘OK. It’s a lot to take in.’ Rory’s on guard. He hasn’t forgotten that I’m the mean cop who didn’t tell him Aislinn was dead. Steve would have had him cosy and chatting in no time.
Steve isn’t the only one who can play nice. ‘It is, all right,’ I say. ‘Do you want me to set you up with Victim Support, find you someone you can talk to? That’s their job, helping people through this kind of thing. They’re good.’
‘No. Thanks.’
‘You sure?’
‘Yes. I’ll be fine. I just . . . what I really need is to know what happened. I need to know that.’
‘Well, yeah,’ I say, with a rueful grin. ‘Don’t we all.’
Rory risks a fast glance at me. ‘Don’t you . . . ? Do you know yet?’
I sigh and give my head a massage, while I have the hair down. ‘To be honest with you, no, we don’t. We’ve followed a load of lines of investigation, and I can’t go into details, but basically none of them are taking us anywhere. That’s why we’re calling back the people who were closest to Aislinn: we’re hoping someone will be able to give us a fresh idea, kick-start things.’
Rory says, still wary, ‘I’d only known her a couple of months.’
‘I know, yeah. But a connection like you and Aislinn had, that counts more than years of sitting next to her in work and chatting about internet kitty pics.’ I get the tone right: no syrup, just direct and clean and matter-of-fact. ‘You understood her. That was obvious, last time we talked. You weren’t just seeing some blonde with a faceful of fancy makeup; you saw straight through all that. You saw who she really was.’
Rory says quietly, ‘That’s what it felt like.’
‘That’s valuable, man. Me, I’m never going to meet Aislinn. I’m relying on people like you to show me who she was. That’s how we’ll figure out what could’ve happened to her.’ I’ve forgotten all about putting my hair back up; too earnest about this conversation, too far into off-duty chat mode. ‘And I’d say you’ve thought about nothing else, the last couple of days. Am I right?’
Rory bites at his lips. After a moment: ‘More or less. Yes.’
‘And the last couple of nights.’
A nod.
‘Hang in there,’ I say gently. ‘I know what it’s like. At first it feels like it’s taken over your whole life, yeah? And you’re never going to get your head above water again?’
The breath and the wariness go out of Rory together. His shoulders fall forward; he pushes his fingers up under his glasses to rub at his eyes. ‘I haven’t
slept
. I don’t do well with no sleep, but I can’t . . . I’ve just been walking up and down my living room, hours and hours – my legs are killing me. Late last night something happened in the street outside, a man shouting, and I thought I was having a heart attack; I genuinely thought I was going to die, right there leaning against my wall. I haven’t been able to open the shop, I haven’t even been able to go out of my
flat
, in case I make a fool of myself by fainting if someone slams a car door.’ He gives me a glance that’s meant to be defiant. ‘I suppose you think that’s pathetic.’
I do, but even more, I think it’s gonna be useful. ‘Me?’ I say, startled. ‘Jesus, no. I’ve seen a lot of people go through this. The way you’re feeling, that’s par for the course.’
‘When you rang . . . I was actually relieved, do you know that? Which is obviously ridiculous, but all I could think was that now I don’t have to spend the day . . .’ His voice wavers. He presses his fingertips to his mouth.
‘You’re doing me a favour, too,’ I say, with just the right amount of sympathy in the smile. ‘In this weather, I’m a lot happier in here than out doing door-to-door.’
‘All I can do is think about it. How it might have happened. I’ve come up with
dozens
of scenarios. That’s why I can’t sleep. When I close my eyes, those are all I can see.’
‘Thank Jaysus,’ I say, heartfelt. And when Rory looks up, eyes widening: ‘That’s what we do, yeah? We come up with theories on how this could have happened, and then we try to match them to the facts. Only this time none of them are matching, and I have to admit, I’ve run out of theories. I’ve been going mental trying to come up with more. If you’ve got any new ones, then for Jaysus’ sake, throw them my way.’
That would give Steve a laugh: me, begging for all the if-then-maybe fantasy crap this guy can dish out. The thought of Steve jabs me up under the ribs hard enough to mess with my breath.
Rory manages a small, tugged-down smile. ‘How long have you got?’
‘Tell you what: start with your best shot. The one that, deep down, you think is actually what happened. If it’s any good . . . Jaysus, I’ll owe you big-time. And if it doesn’t fly, and that fella’s still not back with the coffee, you can throw the next one at me.’
He looks at me like I might be setting him up for some point-and-laugh joke. ‘Seriously?’
‘Of course, seriously,’ I say. ‘I told you: we rang you because we need all the help we can get. Anything you’ve got is better than a load of nothing. Unless you figure it was, like, aliens.’
This time the smile is almost real. ‘No aliens,’ Rory says. ‘I promise.’ I sit up and pull out my notebook, ready to catch the pearls of wisdom. ‘Well. This is the one I keep coming back to. The thing about Aislinn . . .’
Saying her name makes him flinch. He takes off his glasses and polishes them, turning me and the room blurry and soft, easy to talk to. ‘The thing you have to understand about Aislinn,’ he says, ‘is that she was the kind of person who made you daydream. When you were with her, you found yourself coming up with stories.’ His back is straightening already; I’ve got him on home ground. ‘I wondered if it was because she was a daydreamer herself – I could tell she was; it takes one to know one – but it was more than that. It was because she didn’t mind slipping into your daydream. Coming along for the ride. She liked it.’
Which sounds like a load of bollix to me: no one likes being turned into a bit part in someone else’s fantasy. If that reaches my face, Rory can’t see it, not with his glasses off; but he says, like he heard me thinking, ‘She did. Just to give you an idea: when we went for dinner, I said to her that it felt like we’d known each other for years. Aislinn said yes, she felt the same way – she said something like “Maybe we did meet, somewhere along the way. It’s a small country . . .” So I said, “Maybe we played together when we were little. Six, maybe. In a playground, in autumn. Maybe you’d brought your doll along . . .” Aislinn was smiling, and she said she always did bring her doll to the playground, a grubby old thing called Caramel. So I said, “Maybe you put Caramel down on a bench, so she could watch you on the swings, and I was on the swing next to yours. And then another little girl came along and thought Caramel had been abandoned, and picked her up . . .” ’
Remembering the doll’s name would have been adorable in the groom’s speech; in this context, it’s well over the line into creepy. Rory’s smiling faintly, back at the Aislinn in his memory. ‘I told her the whole story. The two of us saw the other little girl taking Caramel away, so we escaped from our families and followed her and her mother onto a bus and all the way into town, running after her down O’Connell Street, into Clery’s – I said a Guard went after us, but we dodged and hid inside a huge umbrella, and we foiled a pickpocket by tripping him up with the point of the umbrella . . . It turned out that the pickpocket had just robbed the little girl’s mother’s wallet, and they were so grateful to us, the little girl didn’t even mind giving Caramel back to Aislinn. And she and her mother brought us home in a horse-drawn carriage.’
Holy Jaysus. By this time I would have been out of the restaurant and halfway home, on the phone to my mate Lisa, breaking my shite laughing and swearing off relationships for life. ‘I see what you mean about the date going great guns,’ I say, smiling away. ‘That must’ve been lovely.’
‘It was. I’m sure it sounds silly, but at the time it felt—’ His chin goes up defiantly. ‘It felt magical. As if the whole thing had actually happened, but somehow we’d both forgotten, and telling the story was bringing it to life again. Aislinn was laughing, adding in bits of her own; she kept saying, “We must have been starving, maybe the man at the doughnut kiosk in O’Connell Street gave us doughnuts,” and “Maybe a dog almost sniffed us out under the umbrella, and we threw a bit of doughnut to make it go away . . .” Like I said: she was happy with me making up stories around her. She encouraged it. She brought it out in people.’
He makes it sound like the whole thing was as unthinking and cute as a smile, just Aislinn skipping along among the daisies scattering happy daydreams wherever she went. I’m not so sure. I think of her in Missing Persons that day, pelting me with everything that should have started my mind wandering off down stories: the mystery, the tears, the snippets of info about what her dad had been like, the scraps of childhood reminiscence. If I had bitten – and maybe I would have, if the Daddy crap hadn’t rubbed me up the wrong way – I would have been a lot more likely to give her what she was after:
And then the genius detective solved the poor orphan girl’s problem, and they all lived happily ever after.
It worked on Gary. Aislinn knew how to use her knack.
She didn’t get me. I raise a mental finger at her and say to Rory, ‘And you’re thinking that might have had something to do with what happened to her.’
Rory is nodding hard. ‘Yes. Yes. The thing about daydreams is that they don’t last. One brush up against reality, and that’s the end of them. I know I must sound ridiculously spacy to someone like you, but I do understand that much.’
A sudden slice to his voice, and a sharp flash of his eyes; gone almost too fast to catch, but I was watching. Rory isn’t fluffy clouds and adorable endings straight through; he’s got something solid and keen-edged at the centre. Just like Aislinn. That combination made the two of them a perfect match, and then it turned on them.
‘For someone like me,’ Rory says, ‘that’s not a problem. I spend half my time in my head anyway, always have. I realise that, too.’ That edge again. ‘So when I bang up against reality and it bursts my bubble, that’s not the end of the world. I’m used to it. Deep down, I was expecting it all the time.’
Which sounds a lot like a sideways explanation for why it couldn’t have been me, honest, Detective. You get them a lot. Mostly you get them from killers. I nod along, concentrating hard on all these valuable insights.
Rory says, ‘But a lot of people aren’t like that. It took me a while to realise, when I was younger: some people spend all their time focused on what’s actually happening.’
‘I know what you mean,’ I say. Confidentially: ‘You get a lot of cops like that. No imagination.’
That gets an automatic half-smile, but Rory’s too deep in his story to pay much attention to me. ‘So if a man like that were to run into Aislinn, he wouldn’t know how to prepare for the fact that his bubble was, almost definitely, going to burst. And when it did . . .’
‘I get you,’ I say, doing a little focused frown. ‘At least, I think I do. Tell me what you’re picturing. Specifics.’
Rory draws patterns on the table with one fingertip. He says, slowly, ‘I think he was someone who wouldn’t even have come onto your radar, because he knew Aislinn so briefly. They meet in a nightclub, maybe, or through her work, and they get talking. Maybe he gets her phone number and they meet up for a drink, or maybe it never even gets that far. But his mind’s already gone wild spinning stories, and he’s intoxicated by the feeling – especially since, to him, it’s brand-new.’
By now Breslin is waiting in the observation room, rolling his eyes and muttering at me to get a move on, while our coffee goes cold. He can do some deep breathing. If Rory needs all day to talk himself into this, then he’s gonna get all day.
‘And then, for whatever reason, Aislinn decides not to go any further with the relationship.’ Rory looks up at me. His fingers are pressing down hard on the tabletop. ‘If you’re not used to that reality check, it’s devastating. It’s like I imagine cold turkey would feel to a heroin addict: actual physical upheaval, as well as psychological. Your body and your mind, floundering.’