The Trespasser (9 page)

‘Yeah.’ But there’s a fraction of a second before it. Another brush past something Lucy isn’t telling us.

I say, ‘Did you get the sense she’d finished it with the other fella before she started seeing Rory? Or would you guess she had them both on the go?’

‘How would I know? Like I said—’

‘Was she still being vague about her social plans? Still cancelling on you at the last minute?’

‘I guess. Yeah, she was.’

I say, ‘So that’s why you were worried about Aislinn?’

Lucy’s still messing around with paint smears, elbows on her thighs and her head right down. ‘Anyone would be. I mean, juggling two guys, one of them’s married . . . that’s not going to end well. And Ash . . . she’s really naïve, in a lot of ways. It wouldn’t occur to her that this was a pretty volatile situation. I just wanted her to be aware of that.’

This is making more sense, but not enough. ‘You said Rory didn’t set off your alarm bells,’ I say. ‘What about this other guy?’

‘I don’t know anything about him
to
set off alarm bells. Like I said. I just didn’t like the whole setup.’

She’s tensing, digging her elbows into her thighs. Whatever we’re circling, she’s not happy being this close to it. I’m not happy myself. Lucy is no idiot; she should know this isn’t the time to fuck about. I say, ‘That still doesn’t explain why your mind went straight to Aislinn when we showed up at your door. You want to try again?’

The edge on my voice makes her elbows dig in harder. ‘That’s why. Because what else was it going to be? Maybe I lead a really boring life, but most people I know don’t do anything that could land actual
detectives
on my doorstep.’

I’m less and less in the mood for bullshit. ‘Right,’ I say. I lean over and give the ashtray a shove so it slides towards Lucy, a little puff of rancid ash rising into the light. ‘Like I said: try again.’

Lucy’s head comes up and she gives me a whole new kind of wary look.

Steve shifts his weight beside me. I know that shift:
Leave it.

I consider punching my elbow through his ribs, but the fact is, he’s right. I’ve been getting on well with Lucy, and I’m about to throw that away for good. I say, more gently, ‘We’re not planning on doing anything about that. We’re only interested in Aislinn.’

The wary look fades, but not all the way. Steve – right back in the Good Cop seat, where he’s happiest – says, ‘Tell us a bit about her. How did yous meet?’

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. She says, ‘When we started secondary school. So when we were twelve.’

‘You’re from the same place, yeah? Where’s that?’

‘Greystones.’

Just outside Dublin; smallish town, but big enough that Lucy and Aislinn were hanging out together by choice, not because there was no one else. Steve asks, ‘And what was Aislinn like, back then? If you had to describe her in one word, what would you pick?’

Lucy thinks back. That affection warms her face again. ‘Shy. Really shy. I mean, that wasn’t the most important thing about her, not by miles, but back then it covered up practically everything else.’

‘Any particular reason? Or just the way she was?’

‘Partly just the way she was, and being that age. But I think mostly it was because of her mother.’

‘Yeah? What was she like?’ This is what I mean about Steve being good with witnesses. The way he’s leaning forward on the sofa, the tilt of his head, the note in his voice: even I could believe he’s genuinely, personally interested.

‘She was messed up,’ Lucy says. ‘Mrs Murray, not Ash. Like, properly messed up; she should’ve been in therapy, or on medication. Or both.’

Steve nods away. ‘What kind of messed up?’

‘Ash said she used to be fine, back before we knew each other. But when Ash was almost ten, her dad walked out on them.’ Lucy should be relaxing, now that we’ve moved away from the murder and the hash and whatever she’s hiding, but her fingers are still rigid on her smoke and her feet are still braced on the paint-splattered floorboards like she might need to run any minute. ‘They never knew why, exactly. He didn’t say. Just . . . gone.’

‘And that wrecked Mrs Murray’s head.’

‘She never got over it. She just started going downhill and couldn’t stop. Ash said she was ashamed; she felt like it had to have been her fault.’ That twist to Lucy’s mouth again, through her cigarette, but this time the warmth isn’t there. ‘That generation, you know? Everything was the woman’s fault somehow, and if you didn’t get how, then you probably needed to pray harder. So Ash’s mum basically cut herself off. From everyone. She still went to the shops and to Mass, but that was it. So by the time we met, Ash had had two years where she spent most of her life stuck in the house, just her and her mum and the telly – she’s an only child. I never even wanted to go over there because her mum creeped me out so much – you’d hear her crying in her bedroom, or else you’d go into the kitchen and she’d just be standing there staring at a spoon while something went up in smoke on the cooker, and the curtains were always closed in case someone saw her through a window and, I don’t know, thought bad things about her . . . And Aislinn had to
live
there.’

Steve’s hit the Go button. Lucy’s talking faster; she’s not going to stop till we stop her, or till she crashes. ‘There was small stuff, too. Like, since her mum didn’t go out, and they didn’t have a lot of money, Ash’s clothes were always wrong – she never had whatever everyone else in school was wearing; it was always charity-shop crap that was two years out of date and didn’t suit her. I used to lend her stuff, but we were different sizes – that was another reason Aislinn was insecure: she was always, not fat, but a bit overweight – and my mum bought her stuff sometimes, but there’s four of us so there was a limit to what she could do, you know? It doesn’t sound like a big deal, but when you’re twelve and everyone already knows that your dad’s left and your mum’s gone off the rails, the last thing you need is to look like some weirdo.’

This is the stuff Steve likes, and the stuff I’m wary of. He thinks it gives us an insight into the victim. Me, I think about those filters. I already know Lucy’s got at least one agenda that we haven’t pinned down. The Aislinn we’re getting here is totally in Lucy’s hands; she can do whatever she wants with her.

I say, ‘This is gonna sound blunt, Lucy, and I’m sorry about that. But I’m not getting why you two were friends. I’m trying to see it, but I can’t put my finger on a single thing yous had in common. What made it work?’

‘I guess you had to be there.’ Lucy half-smiles; not at me, at whatever she’s seeing. ‘We did have stuff in common. I wasn’t having that great a time in school either. I wasn’t an outcast or anything, but I was always into carpentry and electrics, so the boss mares gave me shite about that and called me a dyke, and the people who wanted to get in with them did it too, and it wasn’t some major torture thing but overall school mostly sucked. But Ash, right? She thought I was great – for the exact same things that everyone else was slagging me about. She thought I was totally amazing, like some kind of heroine, just because I told the other girls to fuck off and did what I wanted even though they didn’t like it. Ash thought that was the coolest thing ever.’

The smile spasms into something wretched. She takes a drag off her smoke to force it back under control. ‘And yeah, at first partly I was hanging out with her because I liked her thinking I was amazing, but after the first while it was because I liked
her
. People thought she was thick, but that was just because of what I told you, how she was unsure – it made her seem like she wasn’t keeping up. She wasn’t thick, at all. She was actually really perceptive.’

Steve is nodding along, all enthralled. I’m interested too, but not like that. 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. Aislinn shagging a married man might be enough to do that for Lucy, or there might be more.

‘And she could make even shit things funny. Like I’d have some bitch-off with some cow in our class, and afterwards I’d be all pissed off and adrenaline-y, like “Who does that geebag think she is, I should’ve punched her face in . . .” And Ash would start giggling, and I’d be like, “
What?
It’s not
funny
!” all ready to go off on her; but she’d go, “You were brilliant, like this little furious cat chasing away a horrible dirty hyena” – and she’d do an imitation of me jumping up and down, trying to punch something way above my head. She’d be like, “I thought she was going to run for it, she’d be hiding in a corner screaming for help while you bit the ankles off her, everyone’d be crowding around chanting your name . . .” And all of a sudden I’d be laughing too, and the whole thing wouldn’t feel like a big deal any more.
I
wouldn’t feel like such a big deal.’

Lucy laughs, but there’s a stretched sound to it, like it’s straining against the solid weight of pain dragging downwards. ‘That was Ash. She made things better. Maybe because she’d had so much practice with her mum, trying to make their life even bearable for both of them; I don’t know. But even when she couldn’t make things better for herself, she made them better for other people.’

Please I don’t know where else to—
That woman was still the twelve-year-old that Lucy’s describing: chubby, insecure, clothes that wouldn’t suit anyone and definitely didn’t suit her. The dead woman was a whole different story. I say, ‘Things got better for her, too, though. She grew into her looks, got a bit of style, bit of confidence. Yeah?’

Lucy grinds out her smoke, picks up her glass but doesn’t drink. Now that we’ve moved back to the present, the carefulness is creeping back in.

She says, ‘Not as soon as she should’ve. Even after we left school, she stayed living at home – she felt like she couldn’t leave her mother, and even though I thought her staying was a terrible idea, I could see her point: without Aislinn there, probably her mum would’ve killed herself inside a few weeks. So right up until a few years ago, Ash was going home to that house every night, just like when we were kids. It kept her . . .’ She turns the glass between her hands, watching the light move on the surface of the water. ‘Like it kept her from growing up. She had a job, but it was the same one she’d had since we left school – she was the receptionist at this place that sells toilet roll and hand soap to businesses, which would have been fine except it wasn’t what she wanted to do. She didn’t have a clue
what
she wanted; she’d never had a chance to think about it. I was scared for her, you know? I could see us being thirty, forty, and Ash still doing this job she’d wandered into and going straight home to look after her mum, and her whole life just . . .’ Lucy snaps her fingers, hand lifting through a patch of pale sun. ‘Gone. And she could see it too. She just didn’t know how to do anything about it.’

‘So what changed?’ Steve asks.

‘Mrs Murray died. Three years ago. This is going to sound bad, but it was the best thing that ever happened to Ash.’

‘What did she die of?’

‘You mean, did she actually kill herself?’ Lucy shakes her head. ‘No. She had a brain aneurysm. Ash came home from work and found her. She was devastated, obviously she was, but after a while she started coming out of that, and . . . it was like that was when her actual life started. She sold the house and bought herself the cottage in Stoneybatter. She lost a load of weight, she got her hair dyed, she bought new clothes, she started going out . . .’ A sudden grin. ‘To really trendy places, even. I mean, this was the girl I had to
drag
out for one pint in some manky theatre pub, and suddenly she wants to go to some super-fancy club she’s read about in some social column – and when I said there was no chance the bouncer would let me in, she was like, “I’ll do you up, you can wear my stuff, we’ll get in no problem!” ’

The grin widens. ‘And we actually did. It wasn’t my scene – tossers in labels seeing who could yell loudest – but it was totally worth it just to watch Ash. She had a
ball
. Dancing, and flirting with one of the tossers, and turning him down . . . She was like a kid at a funfair.’

The grin is gone. Lucy grabs a big breath and lets it out in a hiss, trying to keep herself together.

‘She was just getting her chance to figure out what she wanted to do. Just starting to get enough confidence to even think maybe she was
allowed
to figure that out. Just starting—’

She was getting, she wanted, she was.
Lucy has switched Aislinn to past tense. It’s sinking in. Any minute now she’s going to melt down.

‘She was going to quit her job – she’d never had much to spend her salary on, so she had a load of money saved up, and she was going to take a year or two out and decide what she wanted to do next. She was—’ Another grab for breath. ‘She was talking about travelling – she’d never been out of Ireland – about going to college . . . She was
giddy
about it. Like she was waking up after being in a coma for fifteen years, and she couldn’t believe how bright the sun was. She . . .’