“Yeah, that’s what we thought. Looked great on the plans. Hang on—”
She heaved herself out of the chair with a grunt and bent over—I could have lived without that view—to paw through the mess on a side table: celebrity magazines, spilled sugar, a baby monitor, half a sausage roll on a greasy plate. “Here,” she said, shoving a brochure at Richie. “That’s what we thought we were buying.”
The front of the brochure said OCEAN VIEW, in the same curly writing as the signboard outside the estate, over a photo of a laughing couple hugging two catalog kids in front of a snow-white house and Mediterranean-blue waves. Inside was the menu: four-bed, five-bed, detached, duplex, whatever your heart desired, all of them so pristine they almost glowed and so well Photoshopped you could barely tell they were scale models. The houses had names: the Diamond was a five-bed detached with garage, the Topaz was a two-bed duplex, the Emerald and the Pearl and the rest were somewhere in between—it looked like we were in the Sapphire. More curly lettering cooed breathlessly about the beach, the childcare facility, the leisure center, a corner shop, a playground, “a self-contained haven with all the premier facilities of cutting-edge luxe living on your doorstep.”
It should have looked pretty damn sexy—like I said before, other people can get their kicks being snobby about new developments if they want, but I love them; they feel positive, like big bets placed on the future. For some reason, though—maybe because I’d seen what was outside—this brochure struck me as what Richie would have called creepy.
Sinéad jabbed a stubby finger at the brochure. “That’s what we were promised. All that. Says it in the contract and everything.”
“And that’s not what you got?” Richie asked.
She snorted. “Does it look like it?”
He shrugged. “It’s not finished yet. Could be great when it is.”
“It’s not going to be bleeding finished. People stopped buying, with the recession, so the builders stopped building. We went out one morning a few months back and they were gone. Everything, diggers and all. Never came back.”
“Jaysus,” Richie said, shaking his head.
“Yeah, Jaysus. Our downstairs toilet’s banjaxed, but the plumber who put it in won’t come and fix it ’cause he was never paid. Everyone does be saying we should go to court and get compensation, but who’d we bring?”
“The builders?” I suggested.
She gave me that flat stare again, like she was considering punching me for being such a thick. “Um, yeah, we did actually think of that. Can’t find them. They started hanging up on us; now they’ve changed their number. We went to yous lot, even. Yous said our toilet wasn’t a police matter.”
Richie lifted the brochure to get her attention back. “What about all this stuff, the childcare and that?”
“That,” Sinéad said. Her mouth squashed up in disgust. It made her even uglier. “In there’s the only place you’ll ever see that. We complained about the childcare place a load of times—that was one of the reasons we bought here, and then hello, nothing? It opened, in the end. Closed after a month ’cause there was only five kids going. Where the playground was supposed to be, that’s like something out of Baghdad; kids’d take their life in their hands playing there. The leisure center never even got built. We complained about that too, they put an exercise bike in an empty house and said there you go. Bike got robbed.”
“How about the shop?”
A humorless sniff of laughter. “Yeah, right. I’ve to go five miles to buy milk, to the petrol station on the motorway. We haven’t got streetlights. I’m afraid for my life to go out on me own after dark, there could be rapists or anything—there’s a load of non-nationals renting a house over in Ocean View Close. And if something happened to me, would yous lot come out and do anything about it? My husband rang yous a few months back, when there was a bunch of knackers having a party in one of them houses across the road. Yous didn’t show up till the morning. We could’ve been burnt out of it for all you’d care.”
In other words, getting anything out of Sinéad was always going to be this much fun. I said, “Do you know if the Spains had been having any similar problems—with the development company, with the partiers across the road, with anyone?”
Shrug. “Wouldn’t know. Like I said, we weren’t friendly, know what I mean? What happened to them, anyway? Are they dead, or what?”
Before long, the morgue boys were going to be bringing out the bodies. I said, “Maybe Jayden should wait in another room.”
Sinéad eyed him. “No point. He’ll only listen at the door.” Jayden nodded.
I said, “There’s been a violent attack. I’m not in a position to give you details, but the crime in question is murder.”
“Jaysus,” Sinéad breathed, swaying forward. Her mouth stayed open, wet and avid. “Who’s been kilt?”
“We can’t give you that information.”
“Did he go for her, did he?”
Jayden had forgotten about his game. On the screen a zombie was frozen splayed in mid-fall, with scraps of its head mushrooming everywhere. I asked, “Do you have any reason to think he might go for her?”
That wary flick of her eyelids. She slumped back in the chair and folded her arms again. “I was only asking.”
“If you do, Mrs. Gogan, you need to tell us.”
“I don’t know and I don’t care.”
Bullshit, but I know that thick, lumpy stubborn: the harder I pushed, the more solid it would get. “Right,” I said. “In the last few months, have you seen anyone around the estate who you didn’t recognize?”
Jayden let out a high, sharp snicker. Sinéad said, “Never see anyone, hardly. And I wouldn’t recognize most of them anyway. We’re not, like, all buddy-buddy out here. I’ve friends of my own; I don’t need to be hanging off the neighbors.”
Translated, you couldn’t have paid the neighbors enough to hang out with the Gogans. They were probably all just jealous. “Then have you seen anyone who looked out of place? Anyone who worried you for any reason?”
“Only the non-nationals in the Close. There’s dozens of them in that house. I’d say the lot of them are illegal. You’re not going to check that out either, though, are you?”
“We’ll pass it on to the appropriate department. Has anyone called to the door? Selling something, maybe? Asking to check the pipes or the wiring?”
“Yeah, right. Like anyone cares about our wiring—Jaysus!” Sinéad shot upright. “Was it, like, some psycho that broke in? Like on that show on the telly, like a serial killer?”
All of a sudden she looked alive. Fear had knocked the blankness off her face. I said, “We can’t give details of—”
“’Cause if it’s that, you better tell me now, right? I’m not staying here waiting for some sick bastard to come in and torture us, yous lot would stand there and watch him go at it before you’d do a bleeding thing—”
It was the first actual emotion we’d seen out of her. The ghost-blue children next door: nothing but gossip fodder, no more real than some TV show, right up until the danger might be personal. I said, “I can promise you we won’t stand there and watch.”
“Don’t you disrespect me! I’ll get onto the radio, I will, I’ll ring the Joe Duffy Show—”
And we would spend the rest of this investigation battling our way through a media cyclone of cops-don’t-care-about-the-little-guy hysteria. I’ve been there. It feels like someone’s using a tennis ball machine to fire starving pug dogs at you. Before I could come up with something soothing, Richie leaned forward and said earnestly, “Mrs. Gogan, you’ve got every right to be worrying. Sure, you’re a mammy.”
“Exactly. I’ve got my kids to think about. I’m not gonna—”
“Was it a pedophile?” Jayden wanted to know. “What’d he do to them?”
I was starting to see why Sinéad ignored him. “Now, you know there’s a load we can’t be telling you,” Richie said, “but I can’t leave a mammy to worry, so I’m trusting you not to pass this on. Can I do that, yeah?”
I almost cut him off right there, but he had been working this interview well, so far. And Sinéad was calming down, that avid look creeping back up under the fear. “Yeah. All right.”
“I’m gonna put it like this,” Richie said. He leaned closer. “You’ve got nothing to be afraid of. If anyone dangerous is out there, and I’m only saying if, we’re doing everything that needs doing about it.” He left an impressive pause and did something meaningful with his eyebrows. “Do you get me, yeah?”
Confused silence. “Yeah,” Sinéad said, in the end. “Course.”
“You do, of course. Now remember: not a word.”
She said primly, “I wouldn’t.” She would tell everyone she knew, obviously, but she had shag-all to tell them: she would have to stick to a smug look and vague hints about secret info she couldn’t share. It was a cute little trick. Richie went up a rung on my ladder.
“And you’re not worried any more, sure you’re not? Now that you know.”
“Ah, no. I’m grand.”
The baby monitor let out a furious shriek. “For fuck’s sake,” said Jayden, hitting Play and turning up the zombie volume.
“Baby’s awake,” Sinéad said, without moving. “I’ve to go.”
I said, “Is there anything else you can tell us about the Spains? Anything at all?”
Another shrug. That flat face didn’t change, but something flickered in her eyes. We would be coming back to the Gogans.
On our way down the drive I said to Richie, “You want to talk about creepy? Take a look at that kid.”
“Yeah,” Richie said. He fingered his ear and glanced over his shoulder at the Gogans’. “Something he’s not telling us.”
“Him? The mother, sure. But the kid?”
“Definitely.”
“Right. When we come back to them, you can take a crack at him.”
“Yeah? Me?”
“You did a good job in there. Have a think about how you’re going to go about it.” I tucked my notebook into my pocket. “Meanwhile, who else do you want to ask about the Spains?”
Richie turned back to face me. “D’you know something?” he said. “I haven’t got a clue. Normally I’d say let’s talk to the families, the neighbors, the victims’ friends, the people they work with, the lads down the pub where he drinks, the people who saw them last. But they were both out of work. There’s no pub for him to go to. Nobody calls round, not even their families, not when it means coming all this way. It could’ve been weeks since anyone even saw them, except maybe at the school gates. And that’s the neighbors.”
He jerked his head backwards. Jayden was pressed up against the sitting-room window, controller in one hand, mouth still hanging open. He saw me catch him looking, but he didn’t even blink.
“The poor bastards,” Richie said softly. “They’d no one.”