My house isn’t anything flash, merely one of many placed

slap-bang in the middle of suburbia. People live here, they spend their lives here, they make little people and pay big mortgages, and supposedly, supposedly, if they play by the rules then nothing bad happens to them. The problem is that tonight there is a van parked outside, blocking the entranceway, so I can’t just drive into the garage and walk into the house and ignore it. I pull up behind it and climb out, way too tired for any kind of confrontation.

Immediately the doors to the van open. A spotlight comes on,

a man with a camera resting on his shoulder circles around from my right, and a woman with shoulder-length hair appears on my

left. The bright light accentuates her heavy make-up.

“No comment,’ I say before the cameraman can settle into a

comfortable position and the reporter can push the microphone

into my face.

‘Casey Horwell,’ she says, ‘TVNZ news, just a few quick

questions.’

‘No comment,’ I say, ‘and can you move your van? You’re

blocking my driveway’

‘We have a report that Bruce Alderman, the suspect in the

Burial Murders case, was killed tonight in your office.’

I wonder how long it took them to come up with a name

for the case — the Burial Murders) — or whether tomorrow

somebody will have come up with a better one. Casey Horwell

pushes the microphone closer to my face. I recognise her from

the news. Her career took a slide a year ago when she released information she should never have had, along with her own spin on what it meant, and ultimately compromised an investigation.

It resulted in an innocent man being found guilty in the court of public opinion for the rape of a young child. The night the segment aired, the man’s house was burned down with him inside it. He survived with third-degree burns, but his girlfriend didn’t.

I guess tonight Horwell is trying to pick her career back up.

“No comment,’ I say.

‘That’s not going to get you far,’ she says.

‘You need to move your van.’

‘Can you tell us about your involvement today?’

‘No.’

‘You’re no longer on the force. Why were you at the

cemetery?’

“No comment.’

‘Bruce Alderman was killed four hours ago, and yet here you

are, coming home. Why is that?’

I almost tell her that he wasn’t killed, that he killed himself and there’s a difference, a very big difference.

‘How is it you still get cases?’ she asks. ‘Especially these types.

I was led to believe everybody on the force hated you.’

“I still have a few friends in the department,’ I say. ‘They do what they can to help.’

She smiles and I’m not sure why. ‘Is there anything else you

would like to add?’

‘No.’

‘It’s been a long day, I imagine.’

‘It has been.’

‘It’s been a long day for everybody. I guess it must have been hard on you.’

‘Can you move your van now?’

‘Of course. Thank you for your time, Detect… I mean, Mr

Tate.’

The light on the camera switches off. Casey Horwell looks at

me for a few more seconds, that same smile still on her face, then she turns away and climbs into the van. A few seconds later it pulls away. I get back into my car and park it in the driveway, too tired to put it in the garage.

My house has three bedrooms but only one of them gets used.

My daughter’s bedroom is still set up as if one day she’s going to return home, and I’m not exactly sure how healthy that is and I’m not exactly sure I care to know. If my wife were here maybe she’d have made a decision to change that, but she isn’t. It’s just like Patricia Tyler keeping a room for her daughter. Snapshots of time. It seems to be what life is about.

I put a CD on the stereo, grab a beer and go out onto the

deck, pushing play on my answering machine on the way. It’s

my mother. She’s calling to see how the rest of my day went, and to ask about what happened. I make a mental note to call her

tomorrow.

The night has warmed up a little, and I sit on the deckchair

in the misty rain and stare up at the night, listening to the music as the beer helps calm my nerves. I’d sit out here sometimes

with Bridget after Emily was asleep. It’s sheltered from the wind when it’s cold, but when the wind is warm it sweeps in from the opposite direction and onto the deck. I’d slowly drink a beer and she’d slowly drink a wine and we’d talk about our day. I always felt as though I could tell her anything, but there were cases I couldn’t bring home. They would stay in my mind but I didn’t want them in hers. They were a part of my life and I didn’t want them to intrude on hers. We’d talk about our pasts and about

our future; we had plans to move into a bigger house, we were

debating whether to have more children. We would sit out here

and laugh, we would make plans, we would argue.

The rain drifts away and the sky clears a little; a gap appears in the cloud cover, and for a moment there’s a quarter moon up there, it throws around enough pale light so that when I look at my watch I can see the night is slipping further away. Emily’s cat, a ginger torn named Daxter, comes through the sliding door and jumps up on my lap. He starts purring while I scratch him

under his chin. He was only six months old when Emily died, and any question as to whether cats can remember people has been

answered by the fact that the only place he ever sleeps is on her bed, and that sometimes he has the same look in his eyes my wife has — as if he’s looking for something that isn’t there any more.

I finish the beer and head back inside. I refill Daxter’s bowls with food and water, and he seems grateful enough. I walk past my daughter’s bedroom but don’t go in. There isn’t any point.

I take a shower and I think about Rachel Tyler, but I try hard not to think about what her final hour was like. I try to envision a scenario in which Bruce the dead caretaker is innocent, but can’t seem to come up with much. Then I think about Casey Horwell,

and can’t help but wonder if there is any truth in what she said about everybody hating me.

Daxter is asleep on Emily’s bed when I finally hit the sack.

I lie in the darkness, thinking about my dead family and the man who made them that way. I wish that in this average house in this average street nothing bad had ever happened, but it’s already too late.

chapter fourteen

I end up sleeping in, which isn’t a good start to the case. When I flip open my cellphone I find that it has given up. The trip into the lake was worse for it than I thought. I shake it a bit and flex the casing, and I slip the battery in and out and try plugging it into the mains, but nothing happens. I have no idea how many

calls I’ve missed.

I drive through the city thinking that Christchurch and

technology go together like drinking and driving: they don’t

mix well, but some still think it’s a good idea. Everything here looks old, and for the most part it is. People living in the past have set historical values on buildings dating back over a hundred years, and have had them protected from the future. Investors

can’t come along and replace them with high-rises and apartment complexes. It’s a cold-looking city made to look even colder in the dreary weather. Everything looks so damn archaic. Even the hookers look fifty years old. A glue sniffer on a mountain bike has a cardboard tube running from his mouth down to the plastic bag by the handlebars. He’s multi-tasking. He’s sniffing glue and riding on the footpath, and he can keep doing both without the distraction of lifting the bag to his face.

It’s only eleven in the morning, yet I struggle to find a park at the shopping mall. I squeeze in next to a boy-racer Skyline that looks expensive and suggests the guy driving it has a job, though if he’s here at the same time as me on a weekday then he probably doesn’t, unless he’s a private investigator. I head into a Telecom store and deal with a guy who seems more interested in staring across the mall at the hairdresser’s than he does at the phone I’m showing him. I look over at the hairdresser’s and can’t blame