Broken Harbour

by Tana French

Some stuff is gonna find a way to happen; once it’s got started, you can’t stop it, no matter what you do.

This is the gift we offer them, people who loved the victims: rest. For an hour or two they get to sit still and—guilt-free, because we gave them no choice—stop hurling their minds on the jagged shards of what happened.

It’s a wilderness out there; the normal rules don’t apply. Decent, polite people who don’t raise their voices from one year’s end to the next buy a modem and turn into Mel Gibson on tequila slammers.

If you’re good at this job, and I am, then every step in a murder case moves you in one direction: towards order. We get thrown shards of senseless wreckage, and we piece them together until we can lift the picture out of the darkness and hold it up to the white light of day, solid, complete, clear. Under all the paperwork and the politics, this is the job; this is its cool shining heart that I love with every fiber of mine. This case was different. It was running backwards, dragging us with it on some ferocious ebb tide. Every step washed us deeper in black chaos, wrapped us tighter in tendrils of crazy and pulled us downwards.

I have always been caught by the pull of the unremarkable, by the easily missed, infinitely nourishing beauty of the mundane.

Don’t fool yourself: we all have a cruel streak. We keep it under lock and key either because we’re afraid of getting punished or because we believe this will somehow make a difference, make the world a better place.

“Yeah? There’s optimistic, and then there’s plain crazy.”

If you let other people decide what you think about something like that, if you just follow along because it’s trendy, then who are you? When the flock changes direction tomorrow, what, you just throw away everything you think and start over, because other people said so? Then what are you, underneath? You’re nothing. You’re no one.”

I started thinking about all the other people living there. All those different lives. Even if they were all just cooking dinner, one guy could be making his kid’s favorite to cheer her up after a bad day at school, some couple could be celebrating finding out she was pregnant . . . Every one of them, making dinner out there, every one of them was thinking something all their own. Loving someone all their own. Every time I was up there, it hit me harder. That kind of life: it’s beautiful, after all.”

That’s what the whole bloody system is for: to stop arrogant little pricks like you from playing God, handing out death sentences whenever they feel like it. You just stick to the fucking rules, hand in the fucking evidence and let the fucking system do its job.

That’s why we have rules to begin with, Richie: because you can’t trust your mind to tell you what’s right and what’s wrong.

Rule Zero, Richie, the rule to end all rules: your mind is garbage. It’s a weak, broken, fucked-up mess that will let you down at every worst moment there is.

If you trust your mind, you will fuck up and you will fuck up big. Every single thing I’ve done right in my life, it’s been because I don’t trust my mind.”

“I’m not David fucking Attenborough. I don’t sit back on the sidelines and watch nature take its course. If I ever caught myself thinking that way, I’d be the one finding myself a tall building.”

“Murder is nature. Hadn’t you noticed that? People maiming each other, raping each other, killing each other, doing all the stuff that animals do: that’s nature in action. Nature is the devil I’m fighting, chum. Nature is my worst enemy. If it isn’t yours, then you’re in the wrong fucking gig.”

I have always loved simplicity. With you, everything’s black and white, Richie had said, like an accusation; but the truth is that almost every murder case is, if not simple, capable of simplicity, and that this is not only necessary but breathtaking, that if there are miracles then this is one.

In these rooms, the world’s vast hissing tangle of shadows burns away, all its treacherous grays are honed to the stark purity of a bare blade, two-edged: cause and effect, good and evil.

But this is what I know about people getting ready to walk off the edges of their own lives: they want someone to know how they got there. Maybe they want to know that when they dissolve into earth and water, that last fragment will be saved, held in some corner of someone’s mind; or maybe all they want is a chance to dump it pulsing and bloody into someone else’s hands, so it won’t weigh them down on the journey. They want to leave their stories behind.

“You know what it was like? It was like being in a blizzard. You can’t see what’s right in front of your face, you can’t hear anything except this white-noise roar that never lets up, you don’t have a clue where you are or where you’re heading, and it keeps just coming at you from every direction, just coming and coming and coming. All you can do is keep on taking the next step—not because it’ll actually get you anywhere, just so that you don’t lie down and die. That was what it was like.”

Her voice was ripe and swollen with remembered nightmare, like some dark rotten thing ready to burst.

If I believed in curses, I would believe that this is mine: when it matters most, in the moments when I know with the greatest clarity exactly what needs to be done, everything I say comes out wrong.

Just about everything in this life is treacherous, ready to twist and shape-shift at any second; it seemed to me that the whole world would be a different place if you had someone you were certain of, certain to the bone, or if you could be that to someone else.

Rule Number Something: suspects and witnesses need to believe you’re omniscient; you never let them see you being anything other than sure.

That certainty rang in her voice again, clear as struck bronze. It felt like a strange gift, warm as a tiny flame, in this cold place where I would never have expected to find it. This woman I shouldn’t even have been talking to, this woman I didn’t even like: for her, of all people, I was certainty.

A minute is all it takes to find the disinfectant or the razor blades. If someone’s serious enough about killing herself, she will find a way to do it. And if it happens on your watch, you’ll spend the rest of your life ripping yourself to shreds.”

I had always believed that if you can’t get your solve the straight way, you don’t deserve to get it at all. I had never even been the guy who looks the other way while the bloodstained tissue moves to the right place, or the wrap of coke gets dropped, or the witness gets coached.

On the way to Broken Harbor that day, I was what I had given all my adult life to becoming: a murder detective, the finest on the squad, the one who got the solves and got them on the straight and narrow. By the time I left, I was something else.

I had forgotten that God, or the world, or whatever carves the rules in stone, doesn’t give you time off for good behavior.

Like I told Richie, cause and effect isn’t a luxury. Take it away and we’re left paralyzed, clinging to some tiny raft lurching wild and random on endless black sea.

When we can’t see a pattern, we fit pieces together until one takes shape, because we have to.

There isn’t any why. If Dina was right, then the world was unliveable. If she was wrong, if—and this needed to be true—if the world was sane and it was only the strange galaxy inside her head that was spinning reasonless off any axis, then all of this was because of me.

Stepping over the line had come so easily, once there was no other way; so naturally. You can tell yourself as much as you want It was only this once, it’ll never happen again, this was different. There will always be another once-off, another special case that needs just one little step further. All it takes is that first tiny hole in the levee, so tiny it does no harm to anything. The water will find it. It will nose into the crack, pushing, eroding, mindless and ceaseless, until the levee you built collapses to dust and the whole sea comes roaring over you. The only chance to stop that is at the beginning.

“You’re a good cop,” he said. “You picked the wrong case to fuck up, all right, but you’re a good cop. Don’t forget that.”

you need to keep your dreams vivid, or they’ll get lost along the way.

I listened to the small noises of her sucking on her collar, to her breathing slowing and deepening into sleep. She smelled of wild cold air, cigarettes and blackberries. Her coat was sodden with rain, soaking through my pajamas and chilling my skin. I lay still, looking into the dark and feeling her hair wet against my cheek, waiting for the dawn.