road, no gate. Martin thought someone had scoped out my car, clocked me getting into it, watched the windows till he identified my apartment, and then come looking for the keys. In spite of the element of creepiness—me sprawled contentedly on my sofa eating crisps and watching TV, eyes at the dark crack between the curtains—I liked that theory, an awful lot better than I liked my Gouger one. Car thieves weren’t personal, and they were hardly likely to come back.
“Anything else valuable?” Martin asked.
“My laptop. My Xbox. I think that’s it. Did they—”
“Yeah,” Flashy Suit said. “Your telly, too. That’s the standard stuff: easy to sell for a few bob. We’ll keep the serial numbers on file, if you’ve got them, but . . .”
“What we’re trying to figure out,” Martin said, “is why you.”
They both looked at me, heads cocked, expectant half smiles.
“I don’t know,” I said. “Because I’m on the ground floor, I guess. And my alarm wasn’t on.”
“Could be,” Martin agreed. “Crime of opportunity. That definitely happens, all right. But there’s plenty of other ground floors out there. Plenty of other people who don’t set their alarms. At this stage, we have to keep asking ourselves: could there be any other reason why they picked you?”
“Not that I can think of.” And when they kept up the mild, expectant, matching gazes: “I haven’t done anything. I’m not involved in, in crimes or anything.”
“You’re sure. Because if you were, now would be the time to get ahead of it. Before we find out some other way.”
“I’m not.” This was starting to freak me out: what the hell did they think I had been doing? dealing drugs? selling kiddie porn on the dark web? “You can ask anyone. Check me out whatever way you want. I haven’t done anything.”
“Fair enough,” Martin said agreeably, settling back in his chair with one arm looped easily over the back. “We have to ask.”
“I know. I get that.”
“We wouldn’t be doing our job if we didn’t. Nothing personal.”
“I know. I’m not— I’m just telling you.”
“Perfect. That’s all we want.”
Flashy Suit flipped a page. Martin arched his back—the crappy plastic chair creaked under his weight—and adjusted his waistband with his thumbs. “Jaysus,” he said. “I need to lay off the fry-ups; the missus is always telling me. Now, Toby: tell us about Friday night. Start when you left work, say.”
“It’s kind of patchy,” I said doubtfully. This was an understatement. What memories I’ve got came back in fits and starts, over months; at this stage, depending on where I was in the pain-meds cycle, I was sometimes convinced that I was back in college and I had got way too drunk at the Trinity Ball and whacked my head falling off the Edmund Burke statue outside Front Arch.
“You just give me as much as you can. The more the better. Even if it doesn’t seem relevant. Will I get you more water, before you start? Some of that juice?”
I told them what I remembered, which at that point was basically a few flashes of the pub and the walk home, that one image of the two guys staring at me across my living room, and then a couple of bad moments when I’d been on the floor. Martin listened with his hands folded over his belly, nodding and occasionally interrupting to ask a question—could I describe anyone who’d been in the pub? anyone I’d seen on the walk home? had I felt like anyone was following me? could I remember turning my key in the outer door of the building, had there been anyone nearby? Behind him, the TV sputtered with endless bright jerky images, cartoon children throwing their arms out in a dance routine, perky presenters with eyes and mouths stretched wide, little girls holding up dolls whose sparkling practiced smiles matched their own. Flashy Suit shook his pen, scribbled hard, then went back to writing.
Once we got to the central part of the night, the questions got more detailed and more insistent. Could I describe the guy reaching up to the telly? Height, build, coloring, clothing? Any tattoos or marks? What about the guy holding my laptop? Had they said anything? Any names? nicknames? What were their accents like? Anything unusual about their voices, a lisp, a stutter? High-pitched or low?
I told them what I could. The guy by the TV had been about the same height as me, so five eleven? skinny, white, acned; maybe around twenty, as near as