“Oh,” I said, seizing gratefully on the opportunity to forget about the rabbit. “Sure. Did you find the guys?”
“Jesus, man, give us a chance. This stuff doesn’t happen overnight.” He scanned the trolley table. “That’s a lot of Monster Munch you’ve got there.”
“I know. My mother . . .”
“Ah, the mammies,” Martin said indulgently. “Can’t beat ’em. Can I have a packet, can I? You’ve got enough there to feed an army.”
“Sure. Take your pick.”
He dug out a packet of roast-beef flavor and pulled it open. “Lovely. I’m only starving.” Through a mouthful: “We heard they were turning you loose, came in to give you a lift home. Bannon’s downstairs with the car.”
“But,” I said, after a befuddled second. “My mother’s coming to get me.”
“We’ll give her a bell, sure. Explain the change of plans. How long till you’re ready? Few minutes?”
“But,” I said again. I couldn’t figure out a polite way to say But why?
Martin picked up on it anyway. “We said before: we need you to have a look round your place, see what’s missing, if there’s anything that’s not yours that they left behind. Remember?”
“Oh,” I said. I remembered, all right, but I had assumed they meant like a day or two after I got home. “Now?”
“Oh, yeah. Now’s when you’ll notice anything out of place. And you’ll want to get the gaff back in order, and you can’t do that till you’ve done the look-round.” Back in order— It hadn’t even occurred to me to think about what shape my apartment might be in. Overturned furniture, carpet spiky with dried blood, flies buzzing— “Get it over with now, go back to normal. Easier all round.” He threw a few more Monster Munch into his mouth.
“Right,” I said. The thought of walking into that with Martin and Flashy Suit sharp-eyed at my shoulder was bad, but it was a lot better than having my mother there, all big compassionate eyes and arm-squeezes, plus I was pretty sure she was planning to spend the car ride trying yet again to convince me to move back home for a while. “Yeah, no problem.”
“Beautiful. Here”—picking up the holdall my mother had brought me and swinging it onto the bed—“you’ll want the books, and that vase there looks like it cost someone a few bob. The rest can go in the bin, am I right?”
* * *
?Going back into my apartment was worse than I had expected. It wasn’t the horror-film extravaganza I had been picturing: in the living room the furniture was perfectly arranged, the carpets and the sofa had been cleaned (although I could still make out the shadows of bloodstains and spatters, across a shockingly wide area), every surface was immaculate and glossy, not a speck of dust anywhere; the drawers from my sideboard were neatly stacked in a corner, next to carefully aligned piles of the papers and cables and CDs that had been inside them; there was even a big vase of curly purple and white flowers on the table. Sun and leaf-shadows poured over it all.
It was the air that was wrong. Without realizing it, I had gone in there reaching for the faint, familiar smell of home—toast, coffee, my aftershave, the basil plant my mother had given me, the fresh-cotton scent of the candles Melissa sometimes lit. All that was gone, wiped away; in its place was the thick scent of the flowers and a throat-coating chemical underlay, and I was sure that at the back of my nose I caught the sweaty, milky odor of the guy who had rushed me. The place didn’t smell abandoned; it smelled intensely, feverishly occupied, by someone who wasn’t me and didn’t want me there. It was like stretching out a hand to your dog and seeing him back away, hackles rising.
“Take your time,” Martin said, at my elbow. “We know this is tough on you. Need to sit down?”
“No. Thanks. I’m fine.” I braced my left leg harder; if it buckled on me now, I was going to rip the bloody thing right off—
“Your mam must’ve done a cleanup,” Flashy Suit said. “We didn’t leave it in this good nick. Fingerprint dust everywhere.”
“They had gloves,” I said, mechanically. I had just realized that half the drawers were broken, shards of wood sticking out, sides hanging loose.
“Sure,” Martin said, “but we didn’t know that then. And anyway, they could’ve taken them off at some stage, while you were out cold. Better safe, amn’t I right?” He arranged himself comfortably against the wall by the living-room door, hands in his pockets. “Have a look around, tell me if you spot anything missing. In your own time.”
“The TV,” I said. I’d been expecting it but it still looked impossible, the big blank space on my wall, as though if I blinked hard enough my TV would surely be back in its place. “And the Xbox. And my laptop, unless someone put it away somewhere—it was probably on the coffee table—”
“No laptop,” Martin said. “Anything on it that anyone might have wanted?”
“No. I mean, my credit-card numbers would have been on there somewhere, but they could have just taken my—” The top of the sideboard was bare. “Shit. My wallet. It should be, I keep it right over there—”
“Gone,” Flashy Suit said. He had his notebook out again, pen poised and ready. “Sorry. We’ve canceled the cards and put a flag on them, so we’ll be notified if anyone tries to use them, but so far no dice.”
“Oh,” I said. “Thanks.”
“Anything else?” Martin asked.
My eye kept being pulled back to the bloodstain shadows on the carpet. The memory caught me like a singeing crackle of electricity: clogged snuffle of my breath, pain, green curtains, a gloved hand reaching down— “The candlestick,” I said—I was glad to hear that my voice sounded normal, even casual. “I had a candlestick. Black metal, about this big, shaped like one of those twisted railings with a, a, a petal thing at the top—” I couldn’t make myself tell them how I had brought it out of the bedroom with me, the big hero all ready to smash the living shit out of the bad guys. “It was there, on the floor.”
“We’ve got that,” Martin said. “Took it for forensics. We think it’s what they hit you with”—indicating his temple. “We’ll get it back to you once the Tech Bureau’s done with it.”
The scar on my head itched, suddenly and viciously. “Right,” I said. “Thanks.”
“Anything else? Anything here that shouldn’t be?”
I looked around. My books were all wrong in the bookshelf; I didn’t want to ask whether it was the burglars who had spilled them out, or the detectives searching. “I don’t think so. Not that I can see.”
“Those drawers there,” Martin said, pointing. “They went through those pretty hard. When we got here, the papers and that were all over the floor.” Another fizz-zap of memory, crawling through rubble that rustled and slid under me— “Any idea what they might’ve been after?”
The top right drawer was where I had had my hash and the leftover coke. Apparently the burglars had been considerate enough to take those, unless Martin was bluffing to see if I would lie to him—that affable, neutral face watching me, I couldn’t read anything off him— “No,” I said, pushing at what was left of my hair. “I mean, not that I can remember? Mostly it’s just stuff that doesn’t really belong anywhere else. Paperwork, the restore disks from my laptop, I’m not even sure what else was in there . . .”