The Trespasser

by Tana French

Egyptian prince who wanted to marry her and stay in Ireland forever,

That story held my chin high for years, till I was eight and told it to my best friend Lisa, who broke her shite laughing.

Old friends, DNA databases.

because I thought maybe I knew what she had been doing, and I knew she had been right.

closed-down January that makes you think the sun’s never going to drag itself back above the horizon.

a massive scoop of boring and a bigger one of stupid, topped off with an avalanche of paperwork.

banjoed drunk,

dole

Well-fare

too stupid to legally qualify as a human being and kick all their arses out onto the street,

we’ve saved the world from evil in some way that I can’t be arsed figuring out.

Across from me Steve is whistling, which out of most people would make me want to do damage, but he’s doing it right: some old trad tune that I quarter-remember from singsongs when I was a kid,

even the early-morning traffic out on Dame Street only makes it through to us as a soft undemanding hum.

At that hour, if I could overlook all the ways the night shift blows, I could love the squad room.

so suck it up, bitches. Which we do.

If you want it, and both of us do, you take whatever it throws at you.

the one where you spend your day playing knife-edge mind games with psychopathic geniuses,

we get to rubberneck at the cunning psychopaths when the other lads walk them past the interview room where we’re bashing our heads against yet another Spouse of the Year from our never-ending run of domestics,

I give him a stare that should nip that in the bud.

godawful cheerfulness.

“Total lush.

fry my brain with shite telly,

which I figure is probably my bit of satisfaction for the day used up right there.

“You can take that feeding-time look off your face, Conway.

this yoke’s in Stoneybatter, and they’re digging up the quays again.”

little lick-arse,

Kiss ass??

“And if you don’t want Breslin making a show of the pair of ye, get some coffee into you. You both look like shite.”

the air smells of frying sausages and bus fumes.

the more time we have before teacher’s best boy pops up to show us poor thick

eejits

gang of lunatic thugs

Next thing you know, your cat’s been tied to a brick, set on fire and thrown through your window.

working class and never-worked class, mixed with handfuls of yuppies and artists who bought there during the boom because it was so wonderfully authentic,

“No, it’s fucking not. It’s another fucking domestic, or else it’s not even murder, she died from a fucking fall just like the caller said, because if there was a snowball’s chance in hell that it was anything halfway decent, O’Kelly would’ve waited till the morning shift got in and given it to Breslin and McCann or some other pair of smarmy little—Jesus!”

Some idiot up at the front of the traffic jam suddenly notices he’s in a car and starts moving;

everyone else did, and I don’t trust people who everyone likes, plus he smiled too much—but that changed fast.

Steve feels like a friend, or something on the edge of it. But we’re still getting the hang of each other; we still have no guarantees.

“We don’t need backup. We need to be left the fuck alone to do our job.”

Stoneybatter is getting its Sunday morning underway: runners pounding along the footpaths, pissed-off teenagers dragging dogs and brooding over the unfairness of it all, a girl in clubbing gear wandering home with goosebumps on her legs and her shoes in her hand.

You plug one hole, the shite bursts through in a new place and just keeps on pouring.

You’re fighting one killer at a time, instead of the whole worst side of human nature, and you can beat one killer.

Last their whole careers.

Beating your own squad is a whole other thing.

women bodyguards. For themselves, too. Less obvious.”

But the shot of adrenaline is hitting me, too, no matter how I fight it.

turns you into a gladiator walking towards the arena, a few heartbeats away from a fight that’ll make emperors chant your name.

“Garda J. P. Dooley.” Or something. His accent needs subtitles.

“No. Like, there is an alarm system, like”—the

but it wasn’t set. It didn’t go off when we went in, even.”

Seeing her is more of a relief than it should be.

She looks like Dead Barbie.