More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Let’s get one thing straight: I was the perfect man for this case.
If you put your energy into thinking about how much the fall would hurt, you’re already halfway down.
Give me the headline-grabbers and you can keep your drug-dealer stabbings. If you can’t take the heat, stay in uniform.
Here’s what I’m trying to tell you: this case should have gone like clockwork. It should have ended up in the textbooks as a shining example of how to get everything right. By every rule in the book, this should have been the dream case.
If you know your job, you have a responsibility to pass the knowledge on.
So far, you’ve only seen what bad luck can do to people. You’re about to take your first good look at what people can do to each other. Believe me: not the same thing.”
And by the time we get to the scene, you need to be over that. Rule Number One, and you can write this down: no emotions on scene. Count to ten, say the rosary, make sick jokes, do whatever you need to do.
And here’s Rule Number Two: when someone’s behavior is odd, that’s a little present just for you, and you don’t let go of it till you’ve got it unwrapped.
“You’re not fifteen, chum. Dressing like a mugger doesn’t make you a big daring threat to the Establishment; it just makes you a prat.”
“It doesn’t matter where you come from. There’s nothing you can do about it, so don’t waste your energy thinking about it. What matters is where you’re going. And that, mate, is something you can control.”
One of the ways you take charge of where you’re going is by acting like you’re already there.
“You figured my ego liked the car, you mean. Don’t fool yourself: it’s not that simple. These aren’t shoplifters we’re going after, Richie. Murderers are the big fish in this pond. What they do is a big deal. If we tool up to the scene in a beat-up ’95 Toyota, it looks disrespectful; like we don’t think the victims deserve our best. That puts people’s backs up. Is that how you want to start off?”
If the bad guys see a pair of losers, they feel like their balls are bigger than ours, and that makes it harder to break them down. If the good guys see a pair of losers, they figure we’ll never solve this case, so why should they bother trying to help us?
Only teenagers think boring is bad. Adults, grown men and women who’ve been around the block a few times, know that boring is a gift straight from God. Life has more than enough excitement up its sleeve, ready to hit you with as soon as you’re not looking, without you adding to the drama.
Places are like people are like sharks: if they stop moving, they die.
But everyone has one place that they like to think is never going to change.
tiny dart of panic shot through me. I’ve never liked losing my bearings.
in this job everything matters, down to the way you open your car door. Long before I say Word One to a witness, or a suspect, he needs to know that Mick Kennedy is in the house and that I’ve got this case by the balls.
Never let anyone describe the details before you get on the scene, or you’ll see what they saw.
He was shifting on his feet, trying to angle the conversation so that he could see the house, like it was a coiled animal that might pounce at any second.
That was when I felt it: that needle-fine vibration, starting in my temples and moving down the bones into my eardrums. Some detectives feel it in the backs of their necks, some get it in the hair on their arms—I know one poor sap who gets it in the bladder, which can be inconvenient—but all the good ones feel it somewhere. It gets me in the skull bones. Call it what you want—social deviance, psychological disturbance, the animal within, evil if you believe in that: it’s the thing we spend our lives chasing. All the training in the world won’t give you that warning when it comes close. You get
...more
Rebecca liked this
I know this isn’t what we get taught on the detective course, but out here in the real world, my man, you would be amazed at how seldom murder has to break into people’s lives. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, it gets there because they open the door and invite it in.”
Rule Number Three, and Four and Five and about a dozen more: you do not go with the flow in this job. You make the flow go with you.
Interesting fact from the front lines: raw grief smells like ripped leaves and splintered branches, a jagged green shriek.
if you take someone down a peg, always give him a way to climb back up.
‘Mental’ isn’t a reason. It comes in an awful lot of flavors, most of them are non-violent, and every single one of them has some kind of logic, whether or not it makes sense to you and me.
“There was a philosopher,” I said, “a few hundred years back, who said you should always go for the simplest solution. And he wasn’t talking about the easy answer. He meant the solution that involves throwing in the fewest extras on top of what you’ve actually got on hand. The fewest ifs and maybes, the fewest unknown guys who might possibly have just happened to wander up in the middle of the action. Do you see where I’m going with this?”
If I had to pick just one angle on a victim’s life, give me financials any day. People wrap their e-mails and their friendships and even their diaries in multiple layers of bullshit, but their credit-card statements never lie.
Ask any economist: broke is made of how you feel. The credit crunch didn’t happen because people woke up any poorer than they’d been the day before; it happened because people woke up scared.
Some people get hit by a tidal wave, dig in their nails and hold on; they stay focused on the positive, keep visualizing the way through till it opens up in front of them. Some lose hold. Broke can lead people to places they would never have imagined. It can nudge a law-abiding citizen onto that blurred crumbling edge where a dozen kinds of crime feel like they’re only an arm’s reach away. It can scour away at a lifetime of mild, peaceful decency until all that’s left is teeth and claws and terror.
In every way there is, murder is chaos. Our job is simple, when you get down to it: we stand against that, for order.
Everything that stops us being animals is eroding, washing away like sand, going and gone.
The final step into feral is murder. We stand between that and you. We say, when no one else will, There are rules here. There are limits. There are boundaries that don’t move.
the first thing we ever did, when we started turning into humans, was draw a line across the cave door and say: Wild stays out. What I do is what the first men did. They built walls to keep back the sea. They fought the wolves for the hearth fire.
In my book, the media are a necessary evil: they live off the animal inside us, they bait their front pages with secondhand blood for the hyenas to snuffle up, but they come in useful often enough that you want to stay on their good side.
“Those kill for the sake of it, all the time.”
Nature doesn’t let anything go empty, doesn’t let anything go to waste.
Be not afraid; the isle is full of noises: sounds and sweet airs that give delight and hurt not.
Only, somewhere far inside my spine and deep in the palms of my hands, something hummed; like a sound too low to hear, like a warning, like a cello string when a tuning fork strikes the perfect tone to call it awake.
The first thing you notice about my little sister Dina is that she’s the kind of beautiful that makes people, men and women both, forget what they were talking about when she came in. She looks like one of those old pen-and-ink sketches of fairies: slight as a dancer, with skin that never tans, full pale lips and huge blue eyes. She walks like she’s skimming an inch above the ground. This artist she used to go out with once told her she was “pure pre-Raphaelite,” which would have been cuter if he hadn’t dumped her flat on her arse two weeks later. Not that this came as a surprise. The second
...more
For as long as I could remember, a part of me had been waiting for the day it would happen; with the cunning that comes to people whose minds have been stripped to one desire, she picked the only day we weren’t waiting for.
I don’t make a habit of sharing this, in case people take me for a sicko or—worse—a wimp, but give me a dead child, any day, over a child sobbing his heart out while you make him tell you what the bad man did next. Dead victims don’t show up crying outside HQ to beg for answers, you never have to nudge them into reliving every hideous moment, and you never have to worry about what it’ll do to their lives if you fuck up. They stay put in the morgue, light-years beyond anything I can do right or wrong, and leave me free to focus on the people who sent them there.
“Is that why Broken Harbor, yeah? The broken-down pier?” “No. It’s from breacadh: daybreak. I suppose because it would have been a good place to watch the dawn.”
The smell of the sea swept over the wall and in through the empty window-hole, wide and wild with a million intoxicating secrets. I don’t trust that smell. It hooks us somewhere deeper than reason or civilization, in the fragments of our cells that rocked in oceans before we had minds, and it pulls till we follow mindlessly as rutting animals.
That smell is bad medicine. It lures us to leap off high cliffs, fling ourselves on towering waves, leave behind everyone we love and face into thousands of miles of open water for the sake of what might be on the far shore.
Richie shook his head. “Sometimes bad things just happen,” he said. The sky was rich with stars; it had been years since I had seen so many. Behind us, the sound of the sea and the sound of wind sweeping the long grass fused into one long soothing caress down the back of the night. I said, “You can’t think that way. Whether it’s true or not. You have to believe that somewhere along the way, somehow, most people get what they deserve.”
Believing in cause and effect isn’t a luxury. It’s an essential, like calcium, or iron: you can go without it for a while, but in the end you’ll start eating yourself up from inside.
Plenty of people take me for a pompous git way too fond of the sound of his own voice, which is absolutely fine with me. Go ahead and dismiss me; go right ahead and drop your guard.
