When She Was Bad(30)

A child’s scooter lay abandoned on its side at the far edge of the porch. Its central stem was pink and there was a sticker halfway up with a picture of a rainbow on it. Silver streamers that had seen better days hung from the handlebars.

‘Prepare to enter the House of Horror,’ said Sergeant Cavanagh, making quote marks in the air with fingers plump as chicken breasts. The wooden porch floor creaked where he trod. Withdrawing a key from the pocket of his pants, he inserted it into the front door.

‘Never used to bother locking up crime scenes, but now everyone wants a souvenir, know what I mean? Everyone’s gotta try to be part of the action.’

He turned the key and as he did so, I had a sudden strong memory of being a child myself, just a few years older than Laurie, unlocking the door of my house with hands that were stiff with anxiety, and pausing on the threshold to try to gauge by the weight of the air in the hallway which of my mother’s various personas she would be wearing that day. As the sweating policeman nudged open the door, the dread that had been crawling slowly through my veins ever since we pulled up at the house came whooshing to the surface and I had to stop and take a deep breath in.

‘You OK, Anne?’

Ed had a hold of my elbow and was looking at me with concern from behind his glasses.

‘Sure. I’m fine.’

I broke away and carried on into the house.

There are some places that have their own kind of personal scent, just like people do, that gets into your nose and under your skin. Well, Laurie’s family house was like that. Although there was nothing in the hallway, with its polished wood floor and pale paintwork and the wooden stairs that curved around the walls, to say that anything bad had ever happened here, there was just this smell – this sour, stagnant, sad smell – that stoppered up my nostrils until I could hardly breathe.

‘You folks looking for anything in particular?’

Sergeant Cavanagh filled the hallway like a piece of outsized furniture. I wondered if he could smell it too, but he gave nothing away.

‘I think we’ll just have a general look around,’ said Ed. His voice sounded small and tinny.

‘Sure. Well, here’s the living room.’

We followed him through a door to the left of the hallway and found ourselves in a wide room that might have been pleasant if it wasn’t for the heavy drapes in the windows that, together with the screens, blocked out most of the daylight. There were two sofas, one a three-seater and one a two-seater, and a leather armchair with a footstool. All the seats faced towards a small TV in the corner. The sofas were a curious colour, almost two-tone, and it was only when I got nearer that I realized the original green upholstery had been covered in a sheer, dark-blue cover, almost like a fitted dust sheet. On the wall there was a framed family portrait, the type people have taken in a photographic studio and give prints of as presents to grandparents or have made into Christmas cards. There were only three people in the portrait.

I’d caught sight of pictures of Noelle and Peter Egan on the news, but I’d tried to avoid looking too closely at any of the coverage for fear of influencing my dealings with Laurie, so this was the first time I was seeing them up close. If you’ve ever had someone pull back the collar of your shirt and drip ice water down your back for a joke, you’ll have some idea how I felt looking at that picture. There was Laurie, a year or so younger than she was now. Still padded out with toddler fat with her hair pulled tight into two little braids that stuck almost straight out from the side of her head. To her left, her father gazed at the camera through close-set blue eyes. His mouth was stretched into a tight line as if the photographer had told him to smile but that was the most he could do, like a smile that had been ironed flat. I stared at the dip in his cheek where you could almost see a muscle moving, and at the long, hard line of his nose that ended nearly at a top lip so thin it was hardly there at all. I stared at his hand around his daughter’s chubby shoulder, the large, meaty fingers resting on her perfect creamy skin. I thought of what those fingers had done, and something bitter rose into my mouth.

At first glance, Noelle Egan was more pleasant-looking than her husband, attractive even, with high plump cheeks and a smooth forehead framed by dark, natural-looking curls. But closer examination revealed her skin to be caked with thick paste-like make-up that gave her a waxy appearance, and there was a plasticky gloss to her hair. She was leaning her face in towards her daughter and her mouth was cracked open in a wide smile that ended by her daughter’s ear as if she would gobble it up. But her eyes, with their coating of frosted blue and their thick black mascara’d lashes spiky as bee stings . . . I’m not someone who is inclined to be melodramatic. I wouldn’t get far in my job if I was – but Noelle Egan’s eyes were the deadest eyes I’ve ever seen.