“You always knew they loved you?” Aifric offered.
“Something like that, yeah.” He flushed.
They fell silent for a moment. Robert, embarrassed, avoided her eye.
“Robert, there’s something I need to ask you.”
“All right.”
“I talked to Dermot Mulvaney’s friend.”
“Who?”
“The person he was texting that night, the night Laura died. A girl named Sinéad Dempsey. Do you know her?”
Robert shook his head.
“Well, Sinéad told me that Dermot doesn’t like you. That he was jealous.”
Robert snorted. “Dermot thinks he’s better than me, that’s all. It’s true that he doesn’t like me, but he’s not jealous. She got that wrong. He makes a lot more money and that. He’s got a job at a big tech company and thinks he’s going to run the world someday, and he probably will. He’s enough of a prick for it, anyway.”
“She didn’t mean that he was jealous about money. Sinéad said he liked Laura, and he thought Laura was too good for you. Is that right, Robert?”
He held eye contact for a moment, then looked away.
Aifric continued. “Because I was thinking about that, and then about what you said when we met last time. You said that Laura was upset about your holiday plans. She didn’t want you going away without her.”
“Yeah.” He couldn’t look at her.
Aifric let the silence sit for a while. “Did Laura have reason to worry about you going away without her?”
He shook his head. “No, she didn’t. I wasn’t planning on messing around on her. But . . .”
“You had in the past.”
“Yeah.”
“You slept with other girls.”
“Yeah.”
“Laura knew?” She saw the answer in his face. “How did she find out?”
“Someone saw me in a nightclub, a friend of hers. I was drunk. It didn’t mean anything.”
“And Dermot knew because you brought women back to the flat.”
Robert nodded. “Look, I’m not making excuses. I know it was shit. But we weren’t married or anything. Maybe I should have just broken it off. I tried, once, but Laura got really upset, and I did care about her. I know it sounds bad.”
“Is there any evidence of these other relationships?”
Robert swallowed. “Some text messages.”
“And?”
He hesitated. “A couple of pictures. On my phone, like.”
“Okay.”
All of this helped their case. If Robert was sleeping with multiple women, it weakened the prosecution argument that he was so obsessed with Laura that he killed her to keep her from walking away from him. Aifric should feel buoyed by this, not depressed.
“It’s not as bad as it sounds. Honestly.”
He said it with such absolute sincerity that it occurred to Aifric that Robert either believed it, in which case he had deluded himself, or he was a much better liar than she had thought.
Chapter Fifteen
Carrie
Carrie was too agitated to sleep after Aifric left for work. She cleaned the kitchen, finding one task after another until the pain in her ribs forced her to stop. Then she took a long shower, dried her hair, and got into bed, certain that she’d just lie awake, staring at the ceiling. Instead, she fell asleep almost immediately and woke four hours later, completely disoriented. She sat up and looked at her watch, groaning when she saw the time. Two o’clock. In four hours, she would have to find the strength to get up and go back into the station. To face all the sympathetic looks. She would have to keep her head up and pretend she was fine with it. Better yet, she would have to find a way to make a joke of it all, to laugh at herself. They’d like that. They’d think well of her for it.