Free Broken Harbor by Tana French Page B

enough,” I said. “That’d be pretty unsettling.”
    “It was
ham slices
and a
pen
! If her jewelry was gone, or half her underwear or something, then yeah, sure, lose the head. But this stuff . . . I said to her, ‘OK, let’s say somehow someone for some weird reason got in, he wasn’t exactly Hannibal Lecter, was he?’”
    I asked, before it could hit her what she had just said, “What did Jenny think of that?”
    “She got furious with me again. She said the big deal wasn’t what he’d actually
done
; it was all the stuff she couldn’t be sure about. Like if he’d been in the kids’ rooms, gone through their stuff—Jenny said if they could afford it she’d throw away everything the kids had, start over, just in case. What he’d touched—she said everything looked like it was out of place all of a sudden, just an inch, or like it was smudged. How he got in.
Why
he got in—that was really getting to her. She kept saying, ‘Why us? What did he want off us? Do we look like a target? What?’”
    Fiona shivered, a sudden jerk that almost doubled her over. I said easily, “It’s a good question. They have an alarm system; do you know if it was set that day?”
    She shook her head. “I asked. Jenny said no. She never used to bother, not during the day—I think they’d set it at night, when they went to bed, but that was because the local kids throw parties and stuff in the empty houses, they can get pretty out of control sometimes. Jenny said the estate was basically dead during the day—well, you can see for yourselves—so she hadn’t been bothering. But she said she was going to start. She said, ‘If you’ve got those keys, you’d better not use them. I’m changing the alarm code
now
and after this it stays on, day and night, end of story.’ Like I said, she sounded really scared.”
    But when the uniforms had broken down the door and the four of us had gone tramping all over Jenny’s precious house, the alarm had been off. The obvious explanation was that, if anyone had come in from outside, the Spains had opened the door themselves; that Jenny, scared as she was, hadn’t been scared of this person. “Did she change the locks?”
    “I asked that, too—was she going to. She went back and forth, but in the end she said no, probably not, it’d be a couple of hundred quid and the budget couldn’t stretch to that. The alarm would be enough. She said, ‘I don’t even mind that much if he tries to get in again. I’d almost rather he did. At least then we’d
know
.’ I told you: she’s not a wimp.”
    “Where had Pat been that day? Was this before he lost his job?”
    “No, after. He’d gone down to Athlone, for a job interview—this was back when him and Jenny still had the two cars.”
    “What did he think about the possible break-in?”
    “I don’t know. She never said. I thought . . . to be honest, I thought she hadn’t told him. She was keeping her voice right down, on the phone—that could’ve been just because the kids were asleep, but in a house that size? And she kept saying ‘I’—‘I’m changing the alarm code, I couldn’t fit that in the budget, I’ll sort the guy if I get him.’ Not ‘we.’”
    And there it was again: the little thing out of place, the gift I had told Richie to keep his eyes peeled for. “Why wouldn’t she tell Pat? Shouldn’t that be the first thing she did, if she thought they’d had intruders?”
    Another shrug. Fiona’s chin was tucked down into her chest. “Because she didn’t want to worry him, I guess. He had enough on his plate. I thought that was probably why she wasn’t planning on changing the locks, too. She couldn’t do it without Pat knowing.”
    “You didn’t think that was a little odd—even risky? If someone had broken into his home, didn’t he have the right to know?”
    “Maybe, whatever, but I didn’t actually think anyone had
been
in there. I mean, what’s the simplest explanation? Pat took the