The Trespasser

by Tana French

When I finally, when we finally . . . that was when I realized: she honest to God cared about me. She . . . It . . .” A quick involuntary catch of breath. “That blew me away. Just blew me away.” The wonder in his voice. He sounds like a teenager, lifting with joy and amazement, he sounds so tender you could bruise him with one wrong touch. Time after time it’s left me gobsmacked, how people will tell you things they should keep locked inside for life; how ferociously they need the story to be out in the air, in the world, to exist somewhere outside their own heads.

Me and Steve, scrabbling so hard to pull the true story out of the tangle, we forgot the false ones come with their own ferocious, double-edged power.

The silence goes on for so long. The office has changed, shifted, the same way the cozy interview room did. Crayon drawings, tiny flakes stirring in the snow globe. Thin skin stretched over clean bones and clacking teeth.

O’Kelly says, “And.” McCann says, “And I hit her.” Me and Steve, we went at McCann by ripping away what he believed most about his life, blowing it up in front of his eyes, and hoping there’d be too little of him left to hold out against us. Just like Aislinn had been planning. But when we took as much of McCann as we could, shredded him into the last thing he ever wanted to be, we left him with No comment. O’Kelly offered McCann a way back to who he was. McCann’s taken it. He says, “It wasn’t murder, Gaffer. It was manslaughter. I never meant her to die.”

We don’t talk. Down the long silent corridor, the padding of our feet on the carpet like muffled heartbeats. Down the stairs, through the cold draft that fidgets in the stairwell, to the locker room: coats on, satchels on shoulders, locker doors closing. Back upstairs, the smiles and the nods and the few words with Bernadette at reception stuffing tissue packets and throat lozenges into her bag, ready to go home. And outside, to the wide sharp blast of city-smell and cold. The great courtyard, the floodlights, the civil servants scurrying home. It all looks strange: small stark paper things, far away. A big solve does that to you, leaves the world scoured dawn-white, sand-white, empty except for the solve smooth and heavy as a deep-dived rock in your hand.

“So,” Steve says, squinting up at a shadow crossing one of the windows. “You putting in your papers?” I can practically see the might-bes, bobbing like marsh lights over the cobblestones, skimming past the high windows, tricky and beckoning.

The cobblestones have lost that misty feel, they’re centuries’ worth of solid again, and the cold air hits my lungs like caffeine.

“You know what I need, I need a pint. Brogan’s?” Steve hitches his satchel up his shoulder. “You’re buying. You still owe me for Rory not crying.” “What’re you on about? He bawled his eyes—” “I thought you were done being a tosser—” “Nice try. Doesn’t mean I’m gonna be a pushover—” “Ah, good, ’cause I was dead worried about that—” I take one more look up at the rest of my life, waiting for me inside those neat sturdy squares of gold light. Then we start off across the courtyard, arguing, to get a few pints and a few hours’ kip before it’s time to head back and find out what’s in there.