What Shane refused to understand was that she needed this house. Jenny’s father had promised it to her – only for the rest of her family to deny his wish. Jenny remembered the first time her financial advisor had run the idea past her, and he’d concluded with, ‘Jenny, it’s simple. Do the maths.’

  She’d done the maths. She’d exclaimed, ‘Jesus Christ!’ The mere sound of the figure had mesmerised her. It had made her lose her thoughts to contemplation. It was like staring into infinity or tasting pure power. To even mutter the number had been like rolling wealth around in her mouth. With that investment opportunity, she could anonymously buy the house when it hit the market. She could outsmart her mother and yet also give Vera what she wanted: money.

  That was important to Jenny – getting the house fairly – because it was not vengeance she sought, but justice.

  Outside in the hallway, she heard the office door close. He’s working already? In hospital, Jenny had sensed Shane’s impatience to get back to hammering words onto the page. Now that he had been home for less than an hour, he’d already retreated to the sanctuary of his study.

  That weekend had been the first time in fifteen years they’d slept apart, and Jenny had missed him. The great thing about her husband was that he would appear at the right moments – when she needed someone to talk to, when she was turned on, when she wanted to laugh. Other husbands did not seem like that. With them, there appeared to be hours and hours of listening to them talk about things that weren’t important and having to nod along as if they were. It seemed exhausting. No wonder so many didn’t make it.

  She knew that he secretly followed the Instagram account of one of his old girlfriends, and every few days Jenny would spy on whatever was keeping him interested after all these years. His ex had documented the journey of her latest pregnancy on her feed; from shots of the bump to a stylish online gender reveal party, where pink balloons popped out of the box and dozens of people put heart emojis in the comments. Every morning, Shane’s ex put up a brand-new sepia-toned portrait of herself and her perfect children – all styled in Tommy Hilfiger.

  I should’ve given him the children he wanted but, how could I? There was always the other thing; and the other thing was the main thing. Everything else was just camouflage.

  Jenny blinked twice, as if that would clear the choked memory cache of her brain.

  She checked her watch; 1.32 pm. The detective was twenty minutes late, which was like a punch in the gut to a person who checked her watch with a tic-like frequency. It was her experience that, if someone was late for a meeting, they were either an incompetent arsehole or they were trying to make a power statement. She reckoned that with this detective it was the latter option.

  Footsteps in the hall. A moment later Shane entered, and the first things she noticed were the lilies he held by his side. ‘Who are they from?’

  ‘Just a reader. Nice, huh? I’m appreciated!’ He laid them on the far end of the counter. ‘I saw the get well cards from the neighbours, in the hall. They must’ve been afraid I was going to lower Clareville’s tone by dying.’

  Shane was dressed in black jeans, black shirt and black jacket – but he looked a husk of himself, as if he’d been caught in a spider’s web and drained of blood. She wasn’t used to seeing her husband like this. He was always in excellent health, always fit; one of those men who improved with age.

  Jenny tried to sound breezy. ‘Everything OK? You’re pale and… You sure you shouldn’t have stayed in for another night? They’re always angsty over head trauma. The doc suggested another twenty-four hours of cranial observation for a reason.’

  He was thrown, which surprised Jenny. Her husband clearly assumed he’d been doing a reasonable impression of every-day Shane.

  ‘Observation of my wallet, more likely. I’m fine. If it hadn’t been in the papers, they wouldn’t have bothered asking me to stay in.’

  ‘I’m just worried about you, babe. Next weekend, we’ll be down the country, on the boat, cruising the lake… OK, rowing the lake. Soon I’ll be like you and prefer cows to people.’

  ‘When have you last seen a cow being an arsehole? Or a horse? Or a sheep?’

  ‘A very valid point, Shane.’

  For a moment he looked pensive. Then he said, ‘Admittedly, goats can be arseholes.’

  She laughed and felt some of her tension melt away into the tranquillity of their home.

  ‘Did Mum visit while you were in hospital? Like, you would’ve told me, yeah?’

  ‘No,’ Shane answered quickly. ‘I mean, no, I didn’t see her.’ He swallowed. ‘Why? Has she been in touch?’

  Jenny shook her head. ‘Just wondering.’

  They kept each other’s gaze.

  The doorbell sounded and Jenny, in her new black Zara suit, answered it. It was Detective Murray, twenty-three minutes late, dressed – on a hot day – in brown chinos and a navy jumper beneath a blue jacket. He had a smooth, round face with full, well-fed lips – though there was a weakness about his chin, as if they’d run out of clay when making him.

  She looked at her watch. It was deliberate. She knew the time.

  Jenny didn’t like the detective but tried hard not to show it. She knew that he saw her as a spoilt rich girl who thought that poverty was to be restricted to the ‘by the glass’ section of a fantastic wine menu. Jenny had no intention of correcting his mistaken impression. That was, after all, the image she needed to project as an in-demand interior designer. It was important for the world to see her living in a beautifully furnished Clareville home and driving a Land Rover. It would not be fine if the world knew that the house was not hers, that the furniture was her father’s leftovers after her sister had taken first dibs and that the Land Rover was second-hand and ten years old.

  Detective Murray stepped into the hall and said, brightly, ‘You’re all dressed up?’

  ‘LaLucia is opening its first European department store. They chose Dublin and not London. That’s a big deal – and I worked on the interior for the kitchenware department. Usually, I do domestic. So, this is my first corporate.’ Her fingers made a pyramid before her almost juvenile-looking face, to demonstrate the sharpness of her queen-sized thoughts. ‘Because of that, I gotta be at the opening.’

  ‘Yeah, well, nice suit. Seriously. It’s sick, as the kids I arrest say.’

  ‘Um… thanks.’ Jenny tried not to sound grateful, but she appreciated the compliment. With Shane arriving home from hospital, she’d only had thirty minutes to get herself ready, when she generally allowed herself a minimum of an hour.

  Leading Detective Murray into the kitchen, she gestured for him to sit at the antique hunting table. He turned the chair outwards, so he could stretch his legs. Jenny retook her stool at the island next to Shane, pleased that they were both now higher up than the policeman.

  Detective Murray asked, ‘How’s it going, Shane?’

  ‘Not awesome.’ He gestured to the morning newspaper before him, which was open at page eight and included a small story about the break-in. ‘Have you found the second burglar?’

  ‘There was no trace of anyone else in the stolen car. Just the young woman.’ The detective’s tubby round face reddened, and he reminded Jenny of a traffic light.

  ‘I know what I saw.’

  ‘Think about it, Shane. How can you be sure you saw what you saw? I mean, you never mentioned anything about someone else being on the laneway when Jenny arrived. Or when the police and ambulance got there. You never mentioned anything until the next day; Saturday at 7.00 pm, in hospital, to be precise. Until then, it had been a straightforward situation.’

  Jenny suppressed an audible guffaw. So, it was official – her husband’s experience had been downgraded from ‘horror’ to ‘situation’.

  Shane said, ‘I never mentioned anything about anything on the laneway because I was just involved in a head-on collision and there was a dead body lying prostrate two feet from my face. Detective Murray – I know what I saw. He had been there.’

  Jenny watched Shane’s face darken. Her husband didn’t particularly care for the police. His experience until now had been that they were responsible for giving them speeding tickets and, years ago, making them paranoid any time they’d carried recreational drugs. Then there was the fact that clearly, due to the nature of his research, he didn’t rate their work methods.

  ‘Okay, listen to me, Shane,’ Jenny said, about to get assertive. ‘I arrived what… two minutes after the crash? And there was no one there.’

  ‘Great. Here we go again.’ The fact that she had jumped in to support the detective bothered Shane. ‘I just love hearing how even my wife doesn’t believe me.’

  ‘Of course I believe you. I believe that you believe. Get me? But I know what I didn’t see. And the police are right about one thing – you’re lucky not to have been seriously injured. On top of all that, we weren’t even robbed. I mean, nothing was taken. Like I’ve been telling you – just forget about it. You’ll drive yourself nuts, otherwise.’

  Shane failed to mask his disappointment. Jenny held his gaze. A silence stretched.

  Finally, the detective said, ‘Don’t you believe your wife is being honest with you?’

  There followed a traffic jam of silent exchanges. Jenny looked at Murray and couldn’t think of anything to say. Shane, too, shifted his attention to the detective, who sat there waiting, genuinely curious.

  Jenny’s mobile bleated the arrival of a text. She glanced down to the screen. It read: Still going to the LaLucia launch?

  Picking up the phone, she typed: Y.

  A moment later, the reply read: Will meet u there.

  Jenny slid off the stool and planted her feet onto the floor. Again, she typed: Y.

  The two men were looking at her. Jenny cleared her throat. ‘Right, gotta go and be worshipped in the church of my genius.’

  Shane asked, ‘Going alone?’

  ‘Yep.’

  ‘Not meeting anyone?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I can still come, you know? It’s only ten minutes in a taxi. You need a wingman, then it’s not a problem.’

  ‘I’ll be fine.’ Then, with more confidence, she added, ‘I know you hate these things, so I do appreciate it. You’re the best. But that outline isn’t going to write itself by Friday. Get on it when you’re done here.’

  Shane nodded; the detective gave a half-wave, and just like that, Jenny slipped away to the privacy of her outside world.

  6

  1.55 pm: With Jenny just gone, Shane rounded the island, picked up the lilies and passed them to the detective.

  ‘I didn’t want to show you in front of Jenny. Read the card.’

  Murray did so and said, ‘Don’t let it spook you. I mean, “I will destroy you” by sunset of today? When’s that – nine this evening? Ambitious, huh? It’s just a sick joke from your averagely nasty person. Happens all the time. Especially when there’s media coverage. Believe me, there’s many sickos out there but most of them are not “act-out” dangerous.’

  ‘So therefore, some of them are “act-out” dangerous. Anyway, that’s not the point. The point is, that when I read the note, I suddenly remembered that the first line is what the guy said to me in the laneway.’

  Murray almost stood up. But then he relaxed, cleared his voice and spoke softly. ‘I understand what you’re experiencing, Shane. You’ve been through a terrible trauma. And I don’t use that word lightly. But until now, you’ve never mentioned anything about him actually talking to you. Shane, you’ve just read a line in a card and decided you’ve heard it before. You’re in shock. Don’t worry about scaring your wife. She seems fine to me. In fact, get Jenny to go through your mail for the next few days. There’ll probably be more crazy coming your way and it would be better for her to see it first, maybe.’

  Shane wasn’t surprised that Murray did not believe him. He’d experienced the egos of detectives before, when researching long-dead cases. The fact was, Shane was messing with Murray’s standard schtick. Part of that schtick was telling recovering victims that everything bad that could happen had just happened and therefore the chances that more harm would occur, were miniscule. In other words, that a recovering victim was, by default, safe.

  Shane said, ‘Look man, I appreciate all you’ve done. But at the same time, I can’t help noticing that besides the second burglar, you’ve no problem with anything else I’ve told you.’

  ‘But Shane, we have taken your belated Saturday recollection into account.’ He smiled, as if letting Shane know how much of a favour he’d done him. ‘That’s why we’ve already searched the back gardens along the laneway, to check for any trace that someone had been hiding there. But… we found nothing.’

  Shane tried to imagine Detective Murray out there, in the field, actually doing his job. ‘Check the car for prints?’

  ‘Of course. We’ve matched hers. But then there’s lots of other fingerprints. It was stolen on Friday afternoon from outside a community centre. It was an old man’s, who’d owned it for five years. So, there’s prints from passengers in the past week, month, year. But we have her phone – a grotty old thing with dirt clogging the sockets and buttons and melted lipstick smeared across the screen. Alas, no calls or texts to anyone who seems like an accomplice. So, what we mean is, there’s absolutely zero trace of a second perp in that car on the night of the burglary.’ Again, he flashed a condescending smile; a smile Shane liked even less than the first one.

  ‘What about her? Did she have a boyfriend? You did investigate her, right?’

  ‘Yes, Shane. I had a quick look at who she was. And by quick look I mean going back through the archives fifty years.’ Murray looked away to the window and Shane imagined him rolling his eyes. Then he continued. ‘I’m not trying to be smart. I’m just trying to demonstrate that I’m with you in this. We have your back. We want you to feel safe again. She was twenty-two. Deirdre – or Dee, as her few friends knew her. Her people were from rural Cork. Parents – dead. Left home at sixteen to be with her twenty-two-year-old boyfriend, who played in a band. They broke up and she lived for a while in a hippy commune in the west. But you don’t have to be long in my job before realising that kids wearing Extinction Rebellion badges or who have Hindu tattoos are some of the most violent, thieving menaces you’ll ever meet.’

  ‘How’d she get from hippie commune to my house?’

  ‘Out west she got a record for trespassing and shoplifting a few years ago. But she’s been out of the system since then. Finally grew up, seemed to get her life together and studied computer science in Galway. Graduated a year ago and worked for six months designing websites. Then, with the money she’d saved, went backpacking in Asia. She was an outsider. No close friends. No steady boyfriend. She got around, for want of a better phrase. I talked to people who knew her in Galway. They were all surprised – not by the burglary, but that she’d rammed your car. She was… “feisty” is how one described her — but not liable to do something off the wall like that. However, people change.’

  Shane wasn’t satisfied. ‘And…?’

  Murray held Shane’s gaze. ‘Well, unless something comes to light, it’s case closed.’

  Shane could see what was happening. Their burglary had already been chalked up as a win for the police. They’d got the perpetrator. Dead or alive was irrelevant.

  Murray said, ‘Look, I didn’t just knock in to see how you are. Though that’s important to me. To us. To the investigation. But I also wanted to let you know the post-mortem results and… well, if I learn anything from the results that I didn’t see with my own eyes, then it’ll be evidence that I’m not doing my job. And I’m doing my job. God put two eyes in my skull, not a pen in my hand.’

  Murray took out his phone, opened an email and began reading it aloud. Murray listed Deirdre’s height, weight, age and the general health and condition of her corpse, before describing some of the injuries in detail – each with an ascribed cause. All in all, the post-mortem report was indistinguishable from Shane’s crashed vehicle report, which the dealership had emailed that morning; both filled with words such as ‘abrasions’, ‘fracture’ and ‘rupture’. Shane knew the detective was trying to make him grateful to be alive.

  Having finished, Murray began to fasten his jacket but abandoned the attempt, as if surprised to find that he had put on weight recently. From the bottom of the kitchen, he said, ‘This is where it is. That girl broke into your house and tried to rob you. You disturbed her and to escape, she knew that she’d have to possibly kill you. She tried this and died. Nothing was stolen and you’re relatively unharmed. Shane…’ He drew out his name, demanding silence like a patronising but all-powerful headmaster. ‘You could’ve lost everything. And I mean everything. You should be grateful.’

  ‘Look, I know what I saw. But yeah… I get what you’re saying. And thanks, man.’

  ‘I’ll be in touch with any updates. Now, look after yourself and rest up. You’ve been through the wars, my friend.’

  The door closed and Detective Murray let himself out.

  Shane remained at the island counter, staring down at the note that came with the lilies. He checked the time – 2.08 pm – and then wondered just how many ways his life could be destroyed by sundown. Something terrible could happen to Jenny. Could his career be ruined in the next seven hours? He could be killed, mutilated, crippled. Could he be framed for something? He could lose all his money.

  This is pointless and stupid.

  Coffee mug in hand, he entered the front room where the walls contained his ceiling-to-floor library and a sliding ladder. Shane’s own oeuvre was in the process of stretching to seven books; all but the first were in-depth explorations of contemporary Irish true crime. He preferred to examine cases where there wasn’t a conviction, where there was nothing known except confusion.

  Behind his desk were three shelves containing copies of his books, each one in a different language – Chinese, French, German and so on. It was his trophy cabinet. Despite this altar to his success, he often felt dwarfed by the room: the heaviness of the gold curtains, the thickness of the carpet, the flock wallpaper, an antique chess set, the sheer weight and bulk of his late father-in-law’s furniture.