‘I had to spend a small fortune to clean that up, saw Angus, visited a few families, including pick ‘n’ mix kid, and then went into the office to do some paperwork and say hello. I have a new family to work with starting next week, and Beryl is pregnant.’
‘Beryl is pregnant?’ I exclaimed.
‘No, not neighbour Beryl. Co-worker Beryl, the one who’s about twenty-five.’
Gosh, who knew the name Beryl was so ubiquitous in this day and age?
‘Honestly, a very boring, but a very fine and normal day. How about you? Solve any murders?’ Fran asked, as per standard.
‘The usual. Had to chase up some people about forensics and go over some interview reports, and then I…’
I hesitated. I knew it was deeply dishonest of me, but I had already had a month of Fran walking around the house looking miserable. She finally seemed quite happy for the first time in a while. Did I really want to ruin that?
‘Come on, update me!’ Fran pestered, smacking me on the arm while I silently hesitated. ‘I want to know about your day!’
Instead of telling her, I recounted my ‘Judas moment’ in the office, which she found hilarious. I knew keeping Mr O’Neill from her was a lie by omission, and in a court of law, it wouldn’t stand as a moral act from me. Yet I couldn’t bring myself to tellher about our neighbour. Vivian was probably right; his body would surface at some point in the next few days, and that would be a simple case closed. For now, Fran didn’t need to know.
‘Well, being a good, honest copper is yourikiagi,’ she told me reassuringly.
‘Ikiagi?’ I asked. ‘What on earth is that?’
She explained to me thatikiagimeant ‘reason for being’ in Japanese, your life’s purpose. She later told me she couldn’t tell me what her ownikiagiwas.
We went to bed and had sex, hoping that was the one that did it, but admittedly, my performance was – in my personal opinion– still shockingly poor. I felt like I put my hip out during standard missionary, which then, subsequently, led to the sail dropping to half-mast.
Don’t get me wrong, I loved sex, especially with my wife, but when it was every single day in the exact same positioning, it had become a little monotonous. Foreplay was something which I distantly reminisced about. I’d always thought that as soon as Fran got pregnant, we could go back to our normal sex lives. But then I remembered that, once that happened, in less than a year, we would have a slightly bigger problem – I mean – blessing, on our hands.
It was exciting, right? Trying for a baby, having even more sex than we did on our honeymoon. I was thankful for the fact that Fran and I had always been on the same page about kids: four of them, two girls and two boys, if we could choose. We’d said we’d start trying when we moved into a house big enough to begin raising our family, so it had all come together nicely when the promotion had allowed us to move somewhere bigger. We had started…attemptedprocreation a few months before, to get a head start on things, but there had been no real return on investment yet.
I wouldn’t say I was nervous about becoming a dad, but I wasn’t confident. My dad had been something of a legend to me, so the fear of not living up to his example had made me feel a little intimidated at the idea of having a mini-me. It was hard to find a dad who could be both the stern, decisive voice of reason, and the gentle, kind mentor that you could tell anything to, but my father had somehow managed to be both. He had gone through my entire childhood and adulthood without ever disappointing me. That was a tough act to follow.
Fran drifted off to sleep before I did, but I couldn’t stop thinking about Mr O’Neill. Had he been taken? Had he collapsed in his garden? Being so close to a crime scene didn’t exactly help me have some boundaries from my work.
Of course, it had occurred to me that there was a possibility Mr O’Neill might still be alive. But all my training as a detective had honed a nauseating gut feeling, telling me when that was no longer a possibility. Every bone in my body was telling me something wasn’t right, and I knew I wouldn’t be able to leave it alone. Call it myikigai.
I knew I was looking for a killer.
FOUR
GARETH
I took a long sip of my coffee as I walked towards Questioning Room A, readying one of my many personalities as I did so.
I had formed three distinct professional work personas. Office Gareth was an affable, quite charming man; someone you could have a bit of a laugh with. Also known as the colleague who would ask how your weekend anniversary plans had gone on Monday morning or who’d make himself available to look after your pet whilst you were on holiday. Admittedly, that part had become less of Office Gareth after Fran had drawn the line at looking after Isla from CPS’s milk snake while she was in the Maldives.
Meanwhile, Tom Selleck Detective Gareth was reserved for suspects or troublemakers. I tried to mimic my Sunday school priest when he was disappointed in me, blended with a gritty 80s cop on a weekday crime procedural that Nana used to force me to watch when she babysat. Both had astonishing moustaches. Arms always folded, unflinching eye contact, voice lowered a few octaves, and at the end of every question, I would rest my index finger against my temple. It worked on first-time offenders, but repeat visitors to the station could easilysee through it – probably because I couldn’t actually grow a moustache.
Finally, Friendly Neighbourhood Detective Gareth exuded some authority – whilst appearing trustworthy and determined. I would speak succinctly, but listen intently. When talking to a witness, if I just waited for a few moments after they finished speaking, they’d always fill in the silence with seemingly irrelevant details that would often be the info that would bring the case together. Listening and waiting had done me a great deal of good in my career.
I can remember Nana saying ‘If God wanted us to do more talking than listening, he’d have given us two mouths and one ear,’ in her thick Cork accent, paired with the thick, sweet musk of a pensioner.
The best pieces of verbal evidence rarely come from direct answers to questions. Instead, they’re found in the little details, the off-the-cuff remarks that interviewees thought superfluous. A small anecdote about the suspect randomly turning off their phone location or a quick verbal side-note describing recent insurance premiums. That’s what I’d hoped for, but fifteen minutes in, I realised that I wasn’t going to get that nugget of knowledge with Sofia in Questioning Room A. After a while, I realised this was just some kind of weird game of chicken, waiting for the first person to give in and fill the silence. The last four answers she had given had all been monosyllabic and lacked any of the meaningful detail or information that I was after.
‘Any strange behaviour from Mr O’Neill?’
‘No.’
‘Any signs of dementia from Mr O’Neill?’
