Next door was the master bedroom. The bed was narrow for a double and of course meticulously made up: the coverlet, with its fussy little green and yellow flowers, was perfectly smooth, the matching pillows neatly aligned. I wondered which side was which. I tried to imagine the couple in the photograph I’d seen downstairs lying next to each other knowing what they’d done, knowing what each was capable of. Did they ever talk about it, I wondered. Did they ever express remorse, regret, ever wonder how they’d ended up in this situation? Did they ever wake in the night with guilt gnawing away at their insides and turn to face each other and ask themselves who it was they’d married, who they’d become? Did they lose sleep, knowing what was down there in the basement?
I knew the answer.
‘Check out the closet,’ called Sergeant Cavanagh from the landing.
Ed cautiously opened up the double doors of the white wardrobe that took up half of the far wall. The two of us took a sharp intake of breath as the contents were revealed.
‘Wow. These two really were something else,’ said Ed.
The rail was hung with clothes. On the left-hand side were six or seven suits all in different shades of grey, the same number of white shirts. On the right were brightly coloured women’s dresses and blouses. All the hangers were facing the same way. And each and every item of clothing was wrapped in an individual clear plastic cover.
‘Like Howard fucking Hughes, huh? Am I right?’ Sergeant Cavanagh was standing in the doorway watching. His bulk blocked up the only exit, making the already stuffy bedroom feel doubly claustrophobic. I could feel the sweat breaking out under my arms and when I moved, the thin material of my skirt clung unpleasantly to the back of my thighs. I glanced again at that immaculately smooth bed with its puffed-up pillows where once Noelle and Peter Egan would have laid their heads down and slept despite everything they’d done.
‘Excuse me.’ I pushed past Sergeant Cavanagh so abruptly he almost overbalanced.
‘You sure you’re OK, Anne?’ Ed said in a concerned tone, following me out of the room.
I nodded, not trusting myself to speak.
The third doorway off the landing was closed.
‘That’s the kiddie’s room,’ said Sergeant Cavanagh. ‘Don’t worry, there’s nothing real bad in there. It’s just a feeling I got when I went in there. You got kids, Doc?’
To my great surprise I found he was looking at me. Instantly my face burned, and I knew I was blushing.
‘Me? No. That is to say, not yet.’
When I look at that younger self across the divide of decades, I want to cry. Either that or scoop her up and run with her and hide her away where nothing can get to her, none of the things that will eventually turn her into me. Back then, I really thought it was all ahead of me. I always had career ambitions – Harvard, Yale, Stanford. I thought I’d take my pick. But more than work, I thought the rest of it was there for the taking too – husband, a fleet of dimpled children, to be plucked from a shelf whenever I felt like it. Where does it go, that assumption of options? Did my nerve fail because the options dried up, or was it the other way around? Was it when I realized Johnny wasn’t, after all, going to rescue me from myself? When I knew there would be no more children after Shannon? I no longer know. All I do know is that when the overweight detective in the low-slung pants asked me if I had kids, I was embarrassed. I was working on the most important case of my life and I thought I’d be reduced if I exposed myself like that, my personal aspirations and assumptions, the soft underbelly of me.
‘Well, see, I’m a father,’ Sergeant Cavanagh went on. ‘I have a daughter the same age as this kid, and a son the same age as the brother. You know what I’m saying? I go in that bedroom and it gets me thinking about my own kids and all of a sudden my heart is thumping and my blood pressure is going through the roof and I’m full of rage and sadness and it’s not good for me. I need to avoid that kinda stress. When you’re a parent it’s like you wear your heart on the outside of your body. Case like this comes along and you gotta protect yourself from it. You’ll learn that soon enough, Doc.’
So he stayed on the landing, while we nudged our way into the room, and I could feel instantly what he meant about the sadness. It was in the neatly made bed and in the three dolls on the shelf next to it, each stored in its original packaging. It was in the framed photograph on the wall, a smaller version of the one in the living room downstairs. It was in the three pairs of tiny shoes neatly lined up under the bed.
I thought back to my own childhood bedroom. One time when I was eight my mother had sent me to stay with her parents overnight and by the time I came back she’d painted a giant rainbow across one wall. It wasn’t perfect and some of the colours were fat while others were disproportionately narrow, but I loved it. My father had raised his eyebrows when he saw it and muttered something about resale value, but to me it was perfect. That was before my father died and before I realized that some of my mother’s enthusiasm was vodka-sponsored, and way before all her enthusiasm drowned completely in a 42 per cent proof bottle.