Too Close to Breathe Read online

  That was the shining pearl of wisdom my shrink impressed on me before she gave the green on my return to work. Learn to care less, she’d said. I’m not sure whether she grasped the irony of her statement. I spend my days hunting people who have learned to care less, who have little or no empathy, to whom conscience is a foreign entity.

  Frequently, empathy, caring, conscience, are the only weapons I have at my disposal that a killer doesn’t. In my world, empathy is the secret weapon. I spend my time tracing other people’s movements, questioning their motivations, striving to understand the importance of a particular but sickening ritual a killer has subjected their victim to. But I couldn’t say this to the doc.

  I told her, yes. I would learn to care less. I told her that I knew how to do that now. She looked so relieved. I had ticked the box for her. She could close my file. Write me up. Cured. Fit for work. She couldn’t wait to get me out of her office. I couldn’t wait to leave. Our minds in mutual denial, we almost fell over each other on the way to the door. “Call me if you have any more trouble,” she’d said. I agreed, happy in the knowledge that neither of us meant a fucking word of it.

  I spread the pages out over the desk and stare down at the contents for some time. My fingers rub small circles at my temples, but gradually I feel the urge to make some notes on the killer’s profile.

  I’ve barely started when the phone flashes on my desk.

  “Sheehan.”

  There is a click and then silence. I push my notes away. Tension grows across my shoulders.

  “Hello?”

  The line goes dead. I put the phone down and stare at the screen for a few moments. It flashes again and I snatch it up.

  “Hello?”

  “Frankie. It’s Baz.”

  Air rushes out of my chest. “Baz. What is it?”

  “Priscilla Fagan. She’d like to come in tomorrow. To make a statement.”

  I rub a hand across my forehead. “Sorry. Who?”

  “Priscilla Fagan. Peter Costello’s sister.”

  Clarity. “Oh. Right. Of course.”

  A pause. “You all right? You sound a bit distant.” I can almost hear him checking his watch for the time, see him frowning when he realizes it’s barely five thirty.

  “I’m fine.”

  “Right so.”

  He rings off, leaving me staring at the blank screen on my phone. I wait a few more moments to see if it will ring again, but when it stays mute, I drop it into my pocket and decide to leave.

  CHAPTER 5

  THE MORNING HAS been chewed up with paperwork and warrants. Frustration crawls over me, digs needling claws beneath my skin so that even a few hours’ sleep does not free me from the feeling. I’m meeting Clancy in his favorite watering hole. It’s lunchtime, but the pub has yet to fill with punters looking for a warm meal.

  Clancy is buried in the farthest part of the room: a deep wood snug in low lighting next to the fire. I’ve not been here in months, but some things don’t change. The same scrawny-faced man is behind the bar. He nods at me as I pass.

  “Just a coffee, please, Enda.”

  He plucks a cup from a rack behind him. “No bother, Detective. I’ll bring it over.”

  Clancy is focused on his pint. The long dimple in his cheek is sucked inwards, trapped between teeth.

  I sit across from him. “Thanks for ordering the tox reports. That was remiss of me.”

  He shrugs. “No harm.”

  I’m not sure how to bridge the tension that’s been growing like a tumor between us.

  “Jack, I know you’ve taken a big risk putting me back on cases, but let’s be honest with each other . . .”

  He glances up. “Go on then.”

  “I may be unpredictable at times, but I’ll do what it takes and you can’t afford to lose that.”

  He leans forward, eyes round and intent. “Did it cross your mind that I actually fucking give a shit about you, Sheehan?” He shakes his head, takes a messy gulp of stout.

  His voice is low as he speaks, as if we might have an audience, even though there is not a sinner in the pub apart from scrawny-faced Enda.

  “Fuck. I know you, Sheehan. I knew that night when I was screaming down the radio for you to sit tight and wait for backup. I knew that you couldn’t wait five fucking lousy minutes, you had to go in by yourself. Face a lunatic with only a phone as your defense. I knew that as sure as I know now that if you don’t get back into work, you’re lost.”

  It takes me a moment to clamber over the violent tumble of his words. Enda approaches, places my coffee in front of me. I grab at the cup and take a burning mouthful.

  “I’m sorry,” I murmur. A breath in the face of a tornado.

  “Christ, Sheehan. I’m not looking for a fucking apology. There’s a lot on the bloody line, ’tis all.”

  He doesn’t need to spell it out for me. Sympathetic leave for me, only this time of the permanent variety, and early retirement for Clancy if things go arseways.

  Silence spans out between us. Our relationship is not built for honesty; it’s built for files, suspects, knives, gruesome, cruel acts. On our yellow brick road, the tin man doesn’t want a stinking fucking heart; he wants an AK-47.

  My phone rescues us both, and the expression of relief on Clancy’s face nearly makes me laugh.

  “It’s Baz,” I tell him, then answer.

  “I’ve taken Mrs. Fagan down to the station. Or rather, she said she’d meet me there in fifteen,” he says down the line. “She suspects one of them was screwing someone on the side. She didn’t say which one, just mentioned a third party in the relationship.”

  My voice goes up a note of disbelief. “And she’s still willing to give a statement to that effect?”

  “Yup.” He sounds ridiculously pleased with himself.

  “She knows it might incriminate her brother?”

  “Well, I didn’t linger on that fact, but I’m sure she knows it won’t paint him in the best of lights.”

  “Jesus. Whatever happened to blood is thicker than water?”

  He laughs. “Depends how much shit is in the water. You wanna be there?”

  “Yes. Definitely. You’ll do the interview, but don’t start without me. Give me half an hour.”

  Clancy is finishing off his pint. “So?”

  “The husband, Peter Costello, it’s probable he was having an affair, or perhaps she was. His sister, she wants to make a statement.”

  “Odd.”

  “Yeah. We’ll take it slow, make sure it’s not just a toy-sharing squabble left over from childhood.” The pub is filling slowly. Road workers, filth and mud caked along the soles of their boots. High-vis jackets swinging open. They order pints of beer before food. Liquid lunches—no wonder the roads are gone to fuck.

  “There might be evidence of domestic violence,” I add. “An update from the postmortem. The pathologist said that the only way Eleanor’s wrist could sustain that kind of fracture is if something had crushed it or smashed through the bone. The wounds in her abdomen, stab wounds—possibly the result of rage or frustration.”

  “Your money’s on the husband killing her then?”

  “There was nothing in her medical records at all that could explain those injuries. You have to be hiding something not to go to hospital when you’ve been stabbed.”

  “Shame?”

  “I think so.” I pick at the corner of a beer mat. “The very nature of domestic violence is that victims are often shamed into not reporting it. A successful, organized woman to the external world, Dr. Costello would have felt immense pressure to keep her abuse hidden. Factor in the likely bulimia—almost a confirmation of her own self-loathing—and you have someone who is extremely vulnerable to emotional manipulation and physical abuse.” I meet his eyes.

  “And him?”

  I
spread my arms. “Where is he? I’m not saying that an episode of domestic violence resulted directly in her hanging, only that evidence suggests someone was hurting Eleanor Costello on a regular basis.”

  “Why kill her by hanging, though? Surely if she’d died at his hands it would most likely be the climax of a rage-fueled fight. A crime of passion, so to speak. Hanging seems, well, a little passive.”

  I shake my head. “He could be into other stuff. We found something on the computer that suggested one of them used the Dark Web.”

  “Interesting.” He’s reluctant to offer support. He’s scared. For me.

  “Maybe she found something and he needed to make her death look accidental. Maybe he used the underbelly of the internet to hire someone to do it for him. It must’ve been so difficult, sitting in every day on your unemployed ass while your beautiful wife, who has her shit together so tightly that she can make herself throw up her lunch every day, heads off to work to pay the mortgage. Which by the way was just one year short of full payment.”

  He’s laughing. The long dimple that runs down his right cheek deepens, and I get a glimpse of a younger man, a secret charm, a looker with a clever word. His head is bent, shaking from side to side. “I’m not sure he was that unhappy if he was balling some other bitch while she was putting her nose to the grindstone. Sounds like a good enough deal to me.”

  I throw the beer mat at him. “We don’t know yet if he was the one doing the balling. And you know, there’s not enough fucking”—I make quotation marks in the air—“‘bitches’ in this department, that’s the only reason any of you pricks get to the top.”

  He’s still chuckling, the wrinkles on his face darkening but at the same time softening, so unlike the dragging lines that pulled at the sides of his mouth the other morning.

  “Go on,” he says. “Whoever is at the other end of this doesn’t stand a chance. If they weren’t a murdering fucker, I’d feel sorry for them.”

  I can’t feel sorry for anyone. I can’t even afford to feel sorry for Eleanor Costello, even though the image of her slim, smooth body lying on the autopsy table is cataloged at the front of my mind. A flash of blond hair on the street is enough to make me see her congested face on that rope and from there imagine the struggle of her death. I can’t feel sorry for her. To do that steers the investigation.

  A piece of evidence is like a precious card, the face of which you must never reveal to your opponents until the last fanning out of your hand. Each interview you have the chance to gain a card, but you can only do that if you act like you’re playing with nothing.

  This is what I am organizing in my mind as I speed along Dublin quays toward the station. Traffic is heavy, and the occasional car creeps up from the underground car parks at the back of the Custom House, hovers on the roadside waiting for a gap in the convoy. I wave the odd one forward, mind half on the road, half already on the interview with Peter Costello’s sister.

  * * *

  —

  THROUGH THE REFLECTED window, Priscilla Fagan is knitting. There is an aggressive motion to the needles; she looks mightily pissed with something. I know she is working herself up in her head. This is a woman with stuff to say. Baz is pacing the corridor. He is practicing his lines. His questions. I’ve never seen him this anxious. I consider pulling him from the exercise altogether. Peter Costello’s sister may crack open a window on this case. If he puts her on edge, that window will snap shut and no amount of prying will lever it open again.

  This woman needs to feel in control; she needs to lead. By the end of her speech she’ll well and truly believe she has solved this case for us. And she may well have done, but just not in the way she suspects.

  “If you need to vomit, go ahead. I won’t tell anyone.” Banter. It earns me a dark look from beneath his eyebrows.

  I want to distract him; he needs to get through the order of questions on the sheet I gave him. The exact order. If he fluffs it, we may need to call her in again, and a second statement can bring about all sorts of other issues. Like lawyers.

  The pacing continues.

  He takes a deep breath, blows it out, waves the three pages of questions through the stifling office air, glances at them again, then passes them to me. “Right. I’m ready.”

  “Great. She’ll have run out of wool otherwise. You sure you don’t want a fag? Very calming.”

  He’s already at the door. I push a bottle of water into his hand. It helps to have a prop. He gives me a quick backward glance of thanks, and then he is in the room.

  Priscilla Fagan looks like she’s never cooked, eaten, or recommended anything other than pasta for dinner. Rolls of fat ring her middle, her breasts could comfort at least ten heads, and her arms are baker’s arms, chubby, wide, and strong. She’s in her midfifties, and there is not one rib of whitening hair on her head. Thick black waves arch back from her forehead and continue into a practical cut to her ears. She’s the type of woman who’d roll up her sleeves and not blink an eye at gutting a fish; would know the correct way to pluck a pheasant, hang it, use every piece of flesh on its carcass and then some.

  When Baz slides into the seat across from her and offers her his best charming smile, she gives him a look that says: No point in trying that smile on me, sonny. I’ve more use of a new saucepan than I do the likes of you.

  The confidence dims on Baz’s face. “Mrs. Fagan, thanks for doing this.”

  “I want to clear up a few things.” She widens her mouth. A breath. She is about to launch into her statement.

  Baz holds up a palm. “Would you mind if I record our chat?”

  Her eyebrows shoot upward. “Isn’t that what I’m here for, Detective?” No-nonsense.

  Nodding. “Yes, yes.” A green light sparks up on the side of the recorder. The cassette wheels start spinning.

  He reads out the date, the reason for the interview; she is waving him along with her hand. Impatient. Before he takes a breath for the first question, she takes control. A smile creeps across my face.

  “That woman was an out-and-out bad one. She was quite controlling, you know.” She gives him a “Well, what do you make of that?” look.

  Baz recovers well. “How long have you known Dr. Costello, Mrs. Fagan?”

  She is relieved that he’s not poured cold water all over her statement; that he appears to be joining her side, allying himself to her opinion. She leans back in the chair.

  “Well, Peter met her at a charity auction—you know the ones, a nobody celebrity does the auction, et cetera. I can’t remember what this was for, but his company was investing in a new drug and she was part of the research team. At the time, of course, she was a nobody and he was a somebody. Plenty of money to splash around on her, and like gum to a shoe, she made sure she stuck to him.”

  He waits for her to come round to her answer.

  “He was well and truly smitten from the off, I could tell. He brought her to mine for the Sunday roast only the weekend after.”

  “So you knew her since almost their first instance.”

  She purses her lips. Disgust. “Unfortunately.”

  “When was the last time you saw Peter?”

  “We used to meet up every couple of weeks in town, but now, with one thing or another, I haven’t been in touch and I’m afraid it’s been a bit longer than usual. Time gets away from you very quickly when you’re my age, Detective. It must be over six weeks since I saw him.”

  “You didn’t speak to him? On the phone?”

  “It isn’t a usual thing with us, chatting on the phone. I’ve tried him a couple of times. Left a few messages with her. She said she’d pass them on, but I’ve not heard a dicky bird.”

  There’s a break in her voice, and Baz gives her a few moments to collect herself.

  “How did he seem to you?”

  Her eyes narrow. “Fine.” She’s defensive. “
In fact, he seemed happier than he’d been in a long while. There was a bit of a chance of work coming up for him. He was pleased about that.”

  Baz shares her smile, a natural lead to the next question. “How did Peter lose his job? Was it the recession?”

  “That and the rest.”

  Baz nods. Encourages.

  “He invested in her stupid drug, didn’t he? Lovesick fool. Worst investment he’s ever made and maybe his last. No decent company will give him work after it.” Her forehead crumples between her eyebrows. “It’s really affected him, that. Over the last couple of years especially. He’s proud of his work, you know. I’m sure that’s what’s made his health deteriorate.”

  “Peter is ill?”

  She pulls a tissue out from under the cuff of her sleeve. “Terrible. Nothing they can pin down, but when I saw him last, he was awful shook.”

  Baz resists being led any further from his line of questioning. Mrs. Fagan is tiring fast and we need a body of information to work from.

  “How about art, Mrs. Fagan? Was Peter an art enthusiast?”

  “Strange you should ask, but he’s gotten into a bit of painting over the last coupla years. Goes to a class once a week. Not that he’s gifted, mind, sure he’d tell you that himself, but he likes to know how the greats did it, he appreciates the history, you know?”

  “And Eleanor? Did she share the same interest in art?”

  She shrugs. “Wouldn’t know.”

  “Were they happy? How would you describe their relationship?”

  She rubs her nose vigorously, the tip left glowing red when she finishes. The tissue is stuffed back up the sleeve again. Relaxed, honest, unconscious movements. Signals of truth.

  “Strained. When I last saw them together, he could barely meet her eyes. But then—” She stops suddenly; her lip catches between her teeth.

  Baz leans in. “Yes?

  “Sorry,” he corrects. “You are probably parched. Here.” He opens the bottle of water I gave him, fills a plastic cup, passes it to her.