The Trespasser

by Tana French

Burnout happens. It happens more in the squads like Vice and Drugs, where the same vile shite keeps coming at you every day and nothing you do makes any difference: you burst your bollix making your case and the same girls keep on getting pimped out, just by a new scumbag; the same junkies keep on buying the same gear, just from a new drug lord. You plug one hole, the shite bursts through in a new place and just keeps on pouring. That gets to people. In Murder, if you put someone away, anyone else he would’ve killed stays alive. You’re fighting one killer at a time, instead of the whole worst side of human nature, and you can beat one killer. People last, in Murder. Last their whole careers.

But the shot of adrenaline is hitting me, too, no matter how I fight it. Even when you know trained chimps could do your job that day, the walk to the scene gets you: 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.

Steve shrugs. “Fair enough. Maybe not.” This isn’t him diving into a sulk, the way a lot of Ds would if their partner contradicted them, specially in front of someone who looks like Sophie; he means it. It’s not that Steve has no ego—all Ds do—just that his isn’t tied to being Mr. Big Balls all the time. It’s tied to getting stuff done, which is good, and to people liking him, which comes in useful and which I watch like hell.

Before we check out the rest of the cottage, I squat down by the body and carefully, one-fingered, hook her hair back from her face. Steve moves in beside me. Every Murder D I’ve ever known does it: takes one long look at the victim’s face. It doesn’t make sense, not to civilians. If we just wanted a mental image of the vic, to keep us reminded who we’re working for, any phone selfie would do a better job. If we needed a shot of outrage to get our hearts pumping, the wounds do that better than the face. But we do it, even with the bad ones who barely have a face left to see; a week outdoors in summer, a drowning, we go face-to-face with them just the same. The biggest douchebags on the squad, the guys who would rate this woman’s tits out of ten while she lay there getting colder, they would still give her that respect.

The vic’s home is your shot at getting a handle on this person you’re never going to meet. Even for their friends, people filter and spin, and then the friends filter all over again: they don’t want to speak ill of the dead, or they’re feeling maudlin about their poor lost pal, or they don’t want you to misunderstand that little quirk of his. But behind the door of home, those filters fall away. You go through that door and you go looking for what’s not deliberate: what would have been tidied up before anyone called round, what smells weird and what’s down the back of the sofa cushions. The slipups that the victim never wanted anyone to see.

When we talk to Lucy, she’ll explain why she was worried: how Rory got aggressive that time in the pub when he thought Aislinn was looking at another guy, or how he made her keep her coat on in the restaurant because her dress showed her cleavage, or how he used to go out with a friend of a friend and the word was he had slapped her around but Aislinn figured it was exaggerated and he was a lovely guy and all he needed was someone who treated him properly. “Same old story,” I say. “Next time my ma asks me why I’m still single, I’m gonna tell her about this case. Or the last one. Or the one before that.”

A lot of domestics try to get smart like that: take one look at what they’ve done, and start setting up a story. Sometimes it even works—not on us, but on a jury.

Mostly journalists are a good thing. We all have our special relationships—you throw your guy early tip-offs, 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 specializes 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 Offense. I’d rather brush my teeth with a chain saw than tip off Crowley.

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 realized 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.

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.

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.

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 put-downs 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.

We have our IDs out and ready. “I’m Detective Garda Stephen Moran,” Steve says, “and this is my partner, Detective Garda Antoinette Conway.” And he pauses. You always leave a gap there. Lucy doesn’t even look at the IDs. She says, sharp, “Is it Aislinn?” Which is why you leave the gap: it’s unbelievable what people will spill into it.

Your basic witness-face is a mix of eager to help, dying to know the story and oh-God-I-hope-I’m-not-in-trouble.

We wait. In the walls, pipes hoot and groan; upstairs a guy yells something about hot water and someone gallops across the floor, making the postcard curtains tremble. Next to Lucy on the sofa is a Homer Simpson stuffed toy with a rollie paper that says PRINCESS BUTTERCUP stuck to its forehead. Last night was a good one. Next time Lucy sees that toy, she’s gonna shove it to the bottom of her bin. After a long minute, the line of Lucy’s spine resets. She’s not gonna cry or puke, not now anyway; she’s got other things to do. I’m pretty sure she’s just decided to lie to us.

Which is more info than I asked for. It’s the oldest technique in the book—get the witness pissed off with one of you, she’ll give the other one extra—and me and Steve do it a lot, but mostly we do it the other way round. I let Steve take the notes while I enjoy the feeling of being the good cop for the first time in a long time.

“Did you meet Rory again after that?” “No, that was it. Aislinn’s only seen him a few times. She was taking it slow.” Lucy’s head ducks to her cigarette, a long pull. We’ve just brushed past whatever she’s hiding.

That flash of her eyes again, checking our reactions, too ferociously intent. Me and Steve don’t look at each other, but you can feel your thoughts click together like glances. Steve thinking I knew it, I knew something was weird here; me thinking Not a fucking chance I’m gonna get my run today.

I feel it again, that faint pulse that caught at me in Aislinn’s kitchen when Steve showed me the cooker. A pulse like hunger, like dance music: something good, away on the horizon, tugging. I can feel the beat of it hitting Steve’s blood too.

She just . . . she’s really unsure. Of a lot of stuff. Does that make sense?” A quick glance up at me. I nod. Her face looks older than it did when we got here, dragged down around the edges. This conversation is taking a lot out of her. “And if the other person’s totally sure, a lot of the time she ends up thinking they’re probably right. So yeah, I could see her hooking up with a married guy. Not because she thought it was OK, or because she didn’t care, but because he convinced her that it might not be not OK.”

Lucy lights another smoke. I love nicotine. It puts witnesses back in their comfort zone when things get tricky, it keeps the vic’s friends and family from going to pieces, it means we can make suspects as antsy as we want and then throw them an instant chill pill when we want them calm again. Non-smokers are double the hassle; you have to find other ways to adjust their dials. If it was my call, everyone involved in murders would be on a pack a day.

Lucy wants us to know Aislinn, or at least her version of Aislinn; wants it badly. Sometimes we get that: the friends and family want to shove a holy innocent in our faces, so we won’t think this was all the vic’s fault. Usually they do it when they think it was at least partly the vic’s fault.

Daytime’s kicked in properly while we were up there. Rathmines is buzzing: students hunting hangover cures, couples making sure the world can see how in love they are, families who are going to enjoy their family time if it kills them all. One look at it drops us both into the morning-after vortex, when your body suddenly realizes you’ve been up all night and shuts down the engine, turning you floppy with fatigue.

“At least we know why Aislinn’s gaff looked like Working Girl Barbie Playhouse. And why Aislinn looked like Dream Date Barbie. The woman hadn’t got a clue; she was putting together who she was meant to be out of magazines.” Steve says, “Someone like that, she’s vulnerable. Really vulnerable.” “No shit. Rory could be a full-on psychopath with more red flags than the Chinese embassy, and as long as he wore the right labels and helped her put her coat on, she’d still have invited him over for dinner on Date Three. Because that’s what you’re supposed to do.”

I still have my mouth open to slag strips off him when it sinks in: Little Mr. Optimist is right. It would fit. “Jesus,” I say. That pulse is hammering right through me, practically lifting me off the bench. Forget coffee; this job, when it’s right, this job is the hit that speed freaks throw their lives away hunting.

When I’m on a case, I get what O’Kelly would probably call jumpy and what I call alert. Not just me; a lot of Ds do. It’s an animal thing: when you’re tracking a top predator, even though you’re not his prey and he’ll probably shit himself when you come face-to-face, your alert level hits orange and stays there. I’ve been having trouble coming off orange alert lately, even when I’m not working.

I finish flipping through the last witness statement, and stop. The last page is missing. Without that—the page with the signature—the whole thing is worthless. I’ll never prove I didn’t drop it on my way back from the interview room. There’s even an outside chance that actually happened—it was late, I was tired and pissed off and hurrying to finish up by the end of my shift. I can check: wander back and forth like an idiot, peering hopefully under desks and into bins, while this roomful of tossbubbles hide behind their monitors holding back baboon-howls of laughter and waiting to see who explodes first. Or I can go on the rampage looking to string up the fucker who pinched my statement sheet, which is probably what someone is hoping I’ll do. Or I can glue my mouth shut, track down my scumbag witness and spend another couple of hours re-convincing him that talking to cops is cool and digging his statement out of him, one-syllable word by one-syllable word, all over again.

I have trouble seeing a way that one could be harmless. The room feels tricky, twisted: corners warping out of shape, shadows flexing.

We watch Rory Fallon flick his head back and forth and fidget his feet under his chair while he tries to get a handle on the interview room. Interview rooms are designed so you can’t get a handle on them. The linoleum and the table and the chairs are all the plainest, most nondescript ones out there, and it’s not just because of budget cuts; it’s so your mind can’t read anything off them, and it starts reading stuff in. Long enough alone in an interview room and the place goes from nothing to sinister to pure horror film.

Once you realize Breslin is an idiot, you start counting the clichés on their way out of his mouth and noticing that the slick hair is organized over a balding spot, and somewhere in there you realize that he’s actually only around five foot ten and his solve rate is nothing special and you start wondering if he wears a girdle. None of that matters—the dazzle does its job on witnesses and suspects, and Breslin’s moved on long before it can wear off—but it left me pissed off with myself for being suckered, which left me pissed off with Breslin and everything about him.

Breslin rolls his eyes and sits back, shaking his head. Rory throws me a quick grateful glance. We’re turning the interview room into familiar ground—even Breslin’s slaggings are the type Rory has to have taken in school on a regular basis—and that’s settling him. He’s not a helpless little weenie, the way I thought from all that fidgeting and dithering at the start. It’s more complicated than that. Inside his comfort zone, Rory does fine. Take him outside it and he stops coping. I’m normally a jeans guy . . . Aislinn wasn’t his comfort zone.

We’re getting good at Rory, we know how to work him now; he’s all ours. We can bounce him up and down, fling him into fancy shapes, like our very own little yo-yo.

What-if-maybe crap is for weak people. It belongs to the ones who don’t have the strength to make actual situations go their way, so they have to hide away in daydreams where they can play at controlling what comes next. And that makes them even weaker. Every what-if is a gift to anyone who’s looking for a hold on you, and that means us. If a guy’s whole head is in reality, then reality is the only route we can take to get to him. If he’s letting his mind prance off down dozens of twisty hypothetical fairy tales, every one of those is a crack we can use to prize him open.

“Breslin. You think? Seriously?” Steve lifts one shoulder. “Nah. I don’t see it. He’s all about being the big hero. He wouldn’t be able to handle seeing himself as the bad guys’ pet cop. It’d blow his brain cells.” Steve says, “Breslin would find a way to see himself as the hero, no matter what he did. That’s where he starts: with the idea that he’s the good guy, so whatever he’s doing must be right. Then he works backwards from there to figure out how.” Which is true, but I never thought about it that way before—I’ve never spent this much time thinking anything about Breslin before. I don’t like the feel it gives me, clamped onto the back of my neck. What Steve’s talking about, it’s not just Breslin who thinks that way; we all do. When you badger a statement out of some traumatized witness, or manipulate a mother into giving evidence that’ll put her own kid in jail, you get to enjoy the buzz of winning without tying yourself in knots over the deeper moral subtleties, because you’re the good guy in this story. Steve is shredding that into something different, something tangled and thorny; dangerous.

For a dead kid or a dead cop, you work twenty-four hours straight if you need to, then grab a shower and a quick kip and head in for another twenty-four. If you do that for every case, you’ll burn out inside three months. Your basic murder gets an eight-hour shift, maybe twelve or fourteen if something interesting happens.

“That’s it exactly. You know what the weather was like, yesterday: it was a rotten evening, I was freezing, a tree dumped rain down the back of my collar . . . But I felt like I was in a wonderful story. The smell of turf-smoke, and the rain falling through the light of the street lamps . . .” “See? That’s what I’m talking about: you remember more than you thought. And you were in Stoneybatter for a full hour, right? Half past seven to half past eight. You must’ve seen someone.” And there it is again: the sudden involuntary twist to Rory’s neck, the jab at his glasses. Steve brings up that extra time, and all of a sudden Rory doesn’t like this game. That blood-smell hits the back of my nose again. The lift of Steve’s head tells me he smells it too.

Steve says, “And we need to know if any of the colleagues had a thing for her. Just on the off chance that Rory’s telling the truth”—Breslin snorts—“someone might not have been happy that Aislinn had got herself a fella. And her colleagues were the only people she spent any amount of time with.” Nice touch. If anyone spots us doing something that doesn’t point to Rory, we’ve got a potential stalker colleague to take the heat. It might even turn out to be true. “Why don’t you two cover the office romance,” Breslin says. “Feminine intuition, and all that jazz.” “Mine’s in the shop,” I say. “Transmission went. We’ll just have to go with actual detective work. Deasy, Stanton, you head over there first thing tomorrow.”

The rumors say I got this gig because O’Kelly needed to tick the token boxes and I tick two for the price of one—and those are the nice rumors. All of them are bullshit. When the gaffer brought me onboard, he was down a D—one of his top guys had just put in his papers early—and I was Missing Persons’ shining star, waving a sheaf of fancy high-profile solves in each hand. I was fresh off a headline-buster where I’d whipped out every kind of detective work in the book, from tracing phone pings and wi-fi logons to coaxing info out of family members and bullying it out of friends, in order to track down a newly dumped dad who had gone on the run with his two little boys, and then I’d spent four hours talking him into coming out of his car with the kids instead of driving the lot of them off a pier. I was hot stuff, back then. Me and the gaffer both had every reason to think this was gonna be great.

One of the reasons I don’t trust O’Kelly is because of his office. It’s full of naff crap—a framed crayon drawing that says WORLD’S BEST GRANDDAD, pissant local golf trophies, a shiny executive toy in case he gets the urge to make clicky noises with swingy balls—and stacks of dusty files that never move. The whole room says he’s some outdated time-server who spends the day practicing his golf swing and polishing his nameplate and working out fussy ways to tell if someone’s touched his stash bottle of single malt. If O’Kelly was that, he wouldn’t have been running Murder for coming up on twenty years. The office has to be window dressing, to put people off their guard. And the only people who see it are the squad.

The day started off strange. It was still dark when I was leaving my gaff, thick cold fog filling the road, rolling it back to its secretive Victorian self: cars faded to smudges, lit windows and street lamps hanging in the middle of nothing. And a guy at the top of the road, just standing there, on a morning when no sane person would be just standing.

I’ve been trying not to say it out loud because I don’t want to jinx it. Like a dumb kid; like one of those moaners who believe the universe has it in for them and everything is just looking for an excuse to turn to shite. I’ve never been that. This is new, it’s stupid, it comes from the squad training me to look for booby traps everywhere—last week I left my coffee in the squad room while I went for a piss, came back and nearly had it to my mouth before I saw the floating gob of spit—and no way in hell am I gonna blab it to Steve. I don’t fucking like being what anyone trains me to be; I don’t like it at all.

I was on the front desk one lunchtime, a sunny day near the end of my time on the squad; the breeze floating in through the open window smelled like country air, like the summer had thrown off all the layers of city to come cartwheeling in clean and sweet. I was listening to bouncy nineties pop trailing out of a sunroof, eating a turkey sandwich, thinking about that morning’s happy ending—ten-year-old disappeared after a fight with his parents, we found him playing Nintendo in his best mate’s bedroom—and about Murder waiting for me just a couple of weeks away. It felt like we were on the same side that day, me and the world; it felt good.

One look at my face should have told her this was getting her nowhere, but she kept on going. You get that, in Missing Persons: people who think seeing their faces, hearing them cry, will make you do your job better. You get parents who come in every year, on the anniversary of the day their kid disappeared, to find out if you have even one new scrap of info. It sort of works: you keep track of the anniversary, put in a few extra hours when it’s coming up, do your damnedest to find something to give them.

When I was little, I thought about him all the time. I wrote him a letter every week, telling him how great I was, how I’d got all my maths homework right and beaten everyone in the class at sprinting, so that when I finally found an address to send them to, he would realize I was worth coming back for. I walked out of school every day looking for his white limo to scoop me up and speed me away from the bare concrete yard and the aggro-eyed kids with their places already booked in rehab and prison, away to somewhere blue and green and blazing where wonderful lives lay in glittering heaps waiting for me to choose. Every night I lay in bed imagining them: me with scrubs and a stethoscope, in a hospital so blinding with white and chrome it looked ready to lift off; me going down a sweep of staircase to an orchestra waltz, in a dress made of spin and foam; me riding horseback along a beach, eating fancy fruit in a morning courtyard, shooting orders from a leather office chair forty stories above my dizzy view. “I thought the exact same as Aislinn: when he came back, that’s when my real life would start.”

I want Steve to talk. I’m feeling for any difference in him: the distance he keeps from me, the angle of his head, the tone of his voice. The reason I don’t tell people about my father, apart from the fact that it’s none of their business, is that they hear the story and move me in their minds, either to the box marked AHHH POOR PET or to the box marked SKANGER. Steve grew up a lot like I did—probably he was a little posher, lived in a council house instead of a council flat and had a da with a job and a ma who put those lace things on the back of the sofa, but he would have been in school with plenty of kids who didn’t know their daddies. I’m not worried about him getting snobby on me. But Steve is a romantic; he likes his stories artistic, with loads of high drama, a predictable pattern, and a pretty finish with all the loose ends tied up. I wouldn’t put it past him to imagine me as the tragic abandoned child fighting her way through her demons to a better life, and if he does I’m gonna have to smack him across the head.

Every investigation nets you plenty of nothing. You need that—it’s the only way you can narrow down your focus—and normally it feels good, slashing the dead ends off your whiteboard, leaving the live stuff to leap out at you big and bold. This time, though, there’s no slashing going on, just little bits of useless nothing splatting onto my desk like spitballs from some joker I can’t catch. That soaring buzz is turning to edginess, making me shift and knee-jiggle and rub away imaginary itches against the back of my chair. I need something, anything, that’ll zap away Steve’s great big fluffy cloud of if-based babble and leave me with the stuff solid enough to stand on. Incident Room C looks empty to the point of ridiculous, the half-dozen of us dotted around a room that would take thirty easily, the high ceiling and the shining rows of desks shrinking us to dollhouse size. I’m starting to wonder if Breslin was taking the piss out of us, getting the luxury suite for a two-cent case that would have fit in that ex-locker-room shithole with space left over.

The mood comes from the top, and that dare is whirling in my mind like a bad-boy lover, speeding up my heartbeat every time it bobs to the surface, beckoning and menacing.

Clouds are building up, making the light at the windows shift and heave; the incident room feels precarious and at risk, a ship on a bad sea or an island house with a storm coming in. Something—that light, maybe, or Steve’s quiet voice dissipating out through all the empty space, fading to nothing before it can reach the walls—something makes the words sound, out of nowhere, massively sad.

instincts are good—not bragging: every D’s are, specially every D who makes it as far as Murder—and I know how to use them. They’ve come through for me when all the solid detective work in the world would have run me into a brick wall. But this time they’re being bugger-all use. Not that they’re out of commission—every sensor is firing wildly, red lights flashing, beeping noises everywhere—but they just keep sweeping, can’t pin anything down. Rory’s keeping something back, but I can’t tell whether it’s the murder or not; Breslin’s fucking with us, but I can’t figure out why. I feel like I’m missing the bleeding obvious here, but the harder I concentrate, the more all the signals turn to noise. Something is scrambling them. Another D, one with more experience than me, would be well able to do that. The other thing Ds are good at, as well as using their own instincts: wrecking other people’s. Suspects don’t make mistakes because they’re morons, or at least not all of them. They make mistakes because we know how to baffle them into it. Someone wants me to make a mistake. And I’m a couple hundred miles out to sea with all my systems going haywire. That doesn’t faze me too much, not in itself. Danger isn’t the thing scrambling my signals; it’s the only thing keeping me clearheaded enough that I have a chance of navigating my way out of this. I watch Steve, heading back between the desks with a brand-new blue folder sticking out from his handful of random paperwork, and I really...