Page 117 of Better the Devil

Sinead looked around at the others to make sure they weren’t listening in, then spoke in a whisper.

‘You, eh, you talked to Olivia, sir?’

‘I did,’ Logan confirmed. The mere mention of it made a headache he’d been trying to fend off come roaring back.

‘Was it right enough, boss?’ Tyler asked. ‘What Harris said?’

Logan confirmed that it was. That Olivia had known Bosco was coming back for weeks, ever since he’d contacted her from prison.

Sinead nodded solemnly, relieved that her younger brother had been telling the truth, but worried about the implications of it.

‘Why didn’t she tell you?’

Logan hadn’t had a chance to ask that question. It was one of the things he’d been pondering in his office as he’d watched Shona’s car pulling away.

‘I think she was in denial,’ he said, voicing the conclusion he’d eventually come to. ‘I think she wanted to pretend it wasn’t happening. She blocked the number. Thinks she saw him in an alleyway, and legged it. When he turned up at the house, she told him to do one, and only eventually let him in when he begged her to use the toilet.’

He’d got that much from her in the interview room. Some of it she’d told him, the rest he’d gleaned from reading between the lines.

‘She was waiting for him outside the bathroom so she could march him down the stairs again. That’s when I came home and found the bastard.’

‘She must’ve been terrified,’ Sinead said.

Logan looked past her, through the Big Board, through the wall behind it, and out to some distant horizon only he was aware of.

‘Not sure. I don’t know if she even gets scared anymore. Not the way the rest of us do, anyway.’ He refocused on the detective constables, and on the here and now. ‘Oh, you can tell Harris I don’t think she’s got another boyfriend.’

He didn’t tell them about all the extra shifts at the café, or her reason for doing them. He couldn’t bring himself to expose just how far off the mark he’d been. How painfully, devastatingly wrong.

Tyler and Sinead swapped looks. Logan caught Tyler nodding to his wife, egging her on. He predicted their question before they had to ask.

‘She’s not involved,’ he said.

Of course she wasn’t involved.

‘She wasn’t there.’

Of course she wasn’t there.

‘She’s got an alibi.’

The word sounded hard. Clinical. A word detectives used about suspects, not fathers about… whatever she was to him.

She wasn’t his daughter. Of course, she wasn’t. He had a daughter, that wasn’t what this was.

But she was something.

Had been something?

‘Right, well… that’s good,’ Sinead said, and her relief painted itself across her face. ‘I’m really glad to hear that, sir.’

Tyler chuckled. ‘I mean, we didn’t actually think thatOliviahad killed them two guys anyway, did we?’ He shook his head at the preposterousness of the idea. ‘I mean, come on. That’d be a bit of a stretch, wouldn’t it?’

Logan’s back teeth ground together.

What had he been thinking? Why the hell had his mind gone there?

‘Aye. Bit unlikely, right enough,’ he conceded.