All the Things You Are by Declan Hughes Page B

counter-productive it’ll turn out to be: kids, old people, informants who don’t want to be outed, rich people who alternately despise and think they own the cops. It doesn’t matter to Ken: come on over to my place. The shame of it is, he is twice the interrogator Nora is: subtle, empathetic, able to manipulate and steer a conversation without anyone being aware of it, even him, or so it sometimes seems. In that interview room, Ken can seem like some kind of intuitive artist, an actor improvising a scene, seamless, flawless, just pulling it out of the ether, etching it on the wind. Provided, of couse, he hasn’t queered the pitch by insisting on jumping the gun, Nora thinks, smiling at how the cliché overload would make Ken wince. Between them, they make one good cop: the Pantomime Detective, Don Burns, their sergeant, calls them, occasionally with the capper that it’s just too bad they’re each the ass end.
    So it’s second nature to Nora this morning to pay as much attention to Ken as to Claire Taylor, and just when it looks like he’s going to succumb to the temptation to invite Claire down the station, Nora clears her throat and catches his eye. Sometimes, stubborn, ingenuous, he can affect not to understand what she means; this morning, he takes the point clear enough, as well he might, given the thorough-going complexity, not to say epic weirdness of the situation. For a start, when Claire Taylor initially saw the body, an exhumed corpse lying in her own backyard, her reactions were, firstly, to yell with laughter, like she was …
relieved
, it looked like, almost triumphant. Then, having identified the body, she burst out crying. And then, when the tears banked down, this:
    Claire: ‘Where’s Mr Smith?’
    Nora: ‘I beg your pardon?’
    Claire: ‘Mr Smith! Mr Smith!
    Nora: ‘I don’t understand, Ms Taylor. Mr Smith?’
    Claire: ‘Yes, Mr Smith. Last night, this guy wasn’t here.’
    Nora: ‘By “this guy”, you mean the body you have identified as being that of Gene Peterson?’
    Claire: ‘Yes, yes, Gene, Gene Peterson. He wasn’t here. Mr Smith was here. Mr
Smith. (Sobs.)
Oh God. Oh my God. Sorry, I’m sorry. I stepped on him, you see. Mr Smith’s body, last night, in the dark. I got blood on my shoes. Mr Smith’s blood. The poor little
guy.
And so … so someone must have taken his body away and put this body here … why would anyone have done that? Jesus Christ, this is so fucked up.’
    Ken: ‘Ms Taylor. Is Mr Smith … a dog?’
    Claire: ‘Of course he’s a dog. What did you think I was talking about?’
    This is when Ken looks like he’s beginning to flail a little, and his fringe falls in his eyes, and Nora clears her throat and suggests to Claire that maybe they could go in the house and talk, her manner as gentle and solicitous as she can manage. And Claire says OK, but they’ll have to sit on the floor, as all the furniture has been cleared out. Like she said, weird.
    As it turns out, there is some furniture remaining, a couch and a couple of chairs and an oak desk in a kind of den up a spiral metal staircase, and that’s where they’re sitting now. Kind of a student crash pad, Nora thinks, with plenty of actual student memorabilia, posters and photographs and so on, but more, or less, than that: a messy, uncertain, semi-formed feeling, the couch and chairs not really matching the carpet or the wallpaper or each other, dolls and soft toys and postcards and concert tickets and theater programmes scattered about, as if the room belonged to an actual university student and not the extremely well-kept late-thirties-looking woman sitting across from her.
    Ken arrives back with some takeout coffee from Michael’s Frozen Custard on Monroe, since there’s nothing left in the kitchen to make coffee with or in, or drink it from, and once