8

Sam arrived bang on time, looking like a kid on a first date—he had even slicked down his fair hair, ineffectually, with a cowlick at the back—and carrying a bottle of wine. "There you go," he said, presenting it to Cassie. "I didn't know what you were cooking, but the guy in the shop said this will go with just about anything."

"That's perfect," Cassie told him, turning down the music (Ricky Martin, in Spanish; she has this boppy mix that she turns up loud when she's cooking or doing housework) and heading for the wardrobe to find wineglass equivalents. "I'm only making pasta anyway. Corkscrew's in that drawer. Rob, sweetie, you have to actually stir the sauce, not just hold the spoon in the pan."

"Listen, Martha Stewart, am I doing this or are you?"

"Neither, apparently. Sam, are you having wine or are you driving?"

"Maddox, it's tinned tomatoes and basil, it's hardly haute cuisine—"

"Did they surgically remove your palate at birth, or did you have to cultivate such an utter lack of refinement? Sam, wine?"

Sam looked a little bemused. Sometimes Cassie and I forget that we can have that effect on people, especially when we're off duty and in a good mood, which we were. I know this sounds odd, given what we had been doing all day, but in the squads with a high horror quota—Murder, Sex Crime, Domestic Violence—either you learn to switch off or you transfer to Art and Antiques. If you let yourself think too much about the victims (what went through their minds in their last seconds, all the things they'll never do, their devastated families), you end up with an unsolved case and a nervous breakdown. I was, obviously, having a harder time than usual switching off; but it was doing me good, the comforting routine of making dinner and annoying Cassie.

"Um, yes, please," Sam said. He looked around awkwardly for somewhere to put his coat; Cassie took it and tossed it on the futon. "My uncle has a house in Ballsbridge—yeah, yeah, I know," he said, as we both gave him mock-impressed looks, "and I still have a key. I sometimes stay the night if I'm after having a few pints." He looked from one to the other of us, waiting for us to comment.

"Good," said Cassie, diving into the wardrobe again and coming up with a glass tumbler that said NUTELLA on the side. "I hate when some people are drinking and some aren't. It makes the conversation go all lopsided. What the hell did you do to Cooper, by the way?"

Sam laughed, relaxed and rummaged for the corkscrew. "I swear, that wasn't my fault. My first three cases all came in at five in the evening; I rang him just when he was getting home."

"Uh-oh," Cassie said. "Bad Sam."

"You're lucky he'll talk to you," I said.

"Barely," said Sam. "He still pretends he can't remember my name. He calls me Detective Neary or Detective O'Nolan—even on the stand. Once he called me a different name every time he mentioned me, and the judge got so confused he almost declared a mistrial. Thank God he likes the pair of ye."

"It's Ryan's cleavage that does it," said Cassie, nudging me out of the way with her hip and throwing a handful of salt into the pan of water.

"I'll buy a Wonderbra," Sam said. He uncorked the bottle deftly, poured the wine and put glasses into our free hands. "Cheers, lads. Thanks for inviting me over. Here's to a quick solve and no nasty surprises."

* * *

After dinner we got down to business. I made coffee; Sam insisted on washing up. Cassie had the post-mortem notes and photos spread out on her coffee table, an old wooden chest beeswaxed to a shine, and she was sitting on the floor flipping back and forth, eating cherries from the fruit bowl with her other hand. I love watching Cassie when she's concentrating. Utterly focused, she is as absent and unselfconscious as a child—twisting a finger in a curl at the back of her head, pulling her legs into effortlessly odd angles, flipping a pen around her mouth and abruptly pulling it out to murmur something to herself.

"While we're waiting for Miss Cleo over there," I said to Sam—Cassie gave me the finger without looking up—"how was your day?"

Sam was rinsing plates with neat, bachelor efficiency. "Long. Hold music, and all these civil servants telling me I needed to speak to someone else and then putting me through to voicemail. It's not going to be as easy as it sounds, finding out who owns that land. I did talk to my uncle, asked him if this Move the Motorway was actually having any effect."

"And?" I said, trying not to sound cynical. I had nothing against Redmond O'Neill in particular—I had a vague image of a big, ruddy man with a shock of silver hair, but that was all—but I do have a firm general mistrust of politicians.

"He said no. Basically, he says, they're just a nuisance—" Cassie glanced up, raised an eyebrow. "I'm only quoting. They've been to court a few times, trying to stop the motorway; I've still to check the exact dates, but Red says the hearings were at the end of April, the beginning of June and the middle of July. That matches the phone calls to Jonathan Devlin."

"Apparently someone thought they were more than just a nuisance," I said.

"This last time in court, a few weeks ago, Move the Motorway got an injunction, but Red says it'll be thrown out on appeal. He's not worried."

"Well, that's nice to know," Cassie said sweetly.

"That motorway will do a lot of good, Cassie," Sam said gently. "There'll be new houses, new jobs—"

"I'm sure it will. I just don't see why it couldn't do all that good a few hundred yards to one side."

Sam shook his head. "I wouldn't know, sure. I don't understand all that stuff. But Red does, and he says it's badly needed."

Cassie was opening her mouth to say something else, but I caught the glint in her eye. "Stop being a brat and profile," I told her.

"OK," she said, as we brought over the coffee, "the main interesting thing is that it looks to me like this guy's heart wasn't in it."

"What?" I said. "Maddox, he smacked her twice over the head and then suffocated her. She was very, very dead. If he hadn't been serious about it—"

"No, hang on," Sam said. "I want to hear this." My job in the amateur profiling sessions is to play devil's advocate, and Cassie is well able to shut me up if I get overenthusiastic, but Sam has an ingrained, old-fashioned chivalry that I find admirable as well as slightly annoying. Cassie shot me a wicked sideways look and smiled at him.

"Thanks, Sam. As I was saying. Look at the first blow: it was only a tap, barely enough to knock her over, never mind knock her out. She had her back to him, she wasn't moving, he could have smashed her head in; but he didn't."

"He didn't know how much force it would take," Sam said. "He hadn't done this before." He sounded unhappy. This may seem callous, but we often prefer the signs to point to a serial offender. That way there might be other cases to cross-check with, more evidence to collate. If our guy was a first-timer, we had nothing to go on but this.

"Cass?" I said. "You think he's a virgin?" I realized, as I said it, that I had no idea what I wanted the answer to be.

She reached for the cherries absently, her eyes still on the notes, but I saw her eyelashes flicker: she knew what I was asking. "I'm not sure. He hasn't done this often, or recently, or he wouldn't have been this tentative about it. But he could have done it once or twice before, awhile ago. We can't rule out a link to the old case."

"It's unusual for a serial killer to take twenty years off," I said.

"Well," Cassie said, "he wasn't too crazy about doing it this time. She fights, he gets a hand over her mouth, he hits her again—maybe as she's trying to crawl away, something like that—and this one knocks her out. But, instead of keeping on hitting her with the rock—even though they've been struggling and his adrenaline must be through the roof at this stage—he drops it and suffocates her. He doesn't even strangle her, which would be a whole lot simpler: he uses a plastic bag, and from behind so he won't have to see her face. He's trying to distance himself from the crime, make it seem less violent. Gentler." Sam grimaced.

"Or he doesn't want to make a mess," I said.

"OK, but then why hit her at all? Why not just jump her and stick the bag over her head? I think he wanted her out cold because he didn't want to see her suffer."

"Maybe he wasn't confident that he'd be able to subdue her unless he knocked her out right away," I said. "Maybe he's not very strong—or, again, he's a first—timer and he doesn't know what it'll take."

"Fair enough. Maybe a little of all three. I agree that we're looking for someone with no known history of violence—someone who never even got into fights in the schoolyard, wouldn't be considered physically aggressive at all—and probably no history of sexual assault, either. I don't think the rape was really a sex crime."

"What, because he used an object?" I said. "You know some of them can't get it up." Sam blinked, startled, took a sip of coffee to cover it.

"Sure, but then he would've been more…thorough." We all winced. "From what Cooper said, it was a token gesture: one thrust, no sadism, no frenzy, only a couple of inches' worth of abrasion, barely tore the hymen. And it was post-mortem."

"That could be by choice. Necrophilia."

"Jesus," Sam said, putting the coffee down.

Cassie looked for her cigarettes, changed her mind and took one of my strong ones. Her face, momentarily off guard as she tilted it to the lighter flame, looked tired and quenched; I wondered if that night she would dream about Katy Devlin, pinned down and trying to scream. "He'd have kept her for longer. And, again, there'd be signs of more comprehensive sexual assault. No: he didn't want to do it. He did it because he had to."

"Staging a sex crime to put us on the wrong track?"

Cassie shook her head. "I don't know…If that was it, you'd expect him to make a point of it: strip her, pose her with her legs spread. Instead, he pulls her combats up again, zips them… No, I was thinking maybe something more along the lines of schizophrenia. They're almost never violent, but if you get one off his meds and in a full-on paranoid phase, you never know. He could have believed, for some reason of his own, that she had to be killed and raped, even though he hated doing it. That would explain why he tried not to hurt her, why he used an object, why it didn't look more like a sex crime—he didn't want her exposed, and he didn't want anyone thinking of him as a rapist—even why he left her on the altar."

"How's that?" I took the cigarette packet back and tilted it at Sam, who looked like he could do with one, but he shook his head.

"I mean, he could've dumped her in the wood or somewhere, where she might not have been found for ages, or even just on the ground. Instead, he went out of his way to put her on that altar. It could be a display thing, but I don't think so: he didn't pose her, except to leave her lying on her left side, so the head injury was hidden—again, trying to minimize the crime. I think he was trying to treat her with care, respect—keep her away from animals, make sure she was found soon." She reached for the ashtray. "The good thing is, if it's a schizophrenic falling apart, he should be fairly easy to spot."

"What about a hired killer?" I asked. "That would explain the reluctance, too. Someone—maybe the mystery phone caller—hired him to do it, but he didn't have to like the job."

"Actually," Cassie said, "a hired killer—not a professional; an amateur who needed the money badly—might fit even better. Katy Devlin sounded like a fairly sensible kid, wouldn't you say, Rob?"

"She sounds like the most well-adjusted person in that whole family."

"Yeah, to me, too. Smart, focused, strong-willed—"

"Not the type to go off at night with a stranger."

"Exactly. Especially not a stranger who's clearly not all there. A schizophrenic going to pieces probably wouldn't be able to act normal enough to get her to go anywhere with him. More likely this person is presentable, pleasant, good with kids—someone she'd known for a while. Someone she felt comfortable with. He didn't seem like a threat."

"Or she," I said. "How much did Katy weigh?"

Cassie flipped through the notes. "Seventy-eight pounds. Depending on how far she was carried, yeah, a woman could have done it, but it would have to be a pretty strong woman. Sophie didn't find any drag marks at the dump site. Just statistically speaking, I'd bet on a guy."

"But we're eliminating the parents?" Sam said hopefully.

She made a face. "No. Say one of them was abusing her and she was threatening to tell: either the abuser or the other parent could have felt she had to die, in order to protect the whole family. Maybe they tried to stage a sex crime but didn't have the heart to do it thoroughly… Basically, the only thing I'm more or less sure of is that we're not looking for a psychopath or a sadist—our guy couldn't dehumanize her and didn't enjoy seeing her suffer. We're looking for someone who didn't want to do it, someone who felt he was doing it out of necessity. I don't think he'll insert himself into the investigation—he won't be getting off on all the attention, nothing like that—and I don't think he'll do it again any time soon, not unless he feels threatened somehow. And he's almost definitely local. A real profiler could probably be a lot more specific, but…"

"You got your degree at Trinity, right?" Sam said.

Cassie gave a quick shake of her head, reached for more cherries. "I dropped out in fourth year."

"Why'd you do that?"

She spat a cherry stone into her palm and gave Sam a smile I knew, an exceptionally sweet smile that scrunched up her face till you couldn't see her eyes. "Because what would you people do without me?"

I could have told him she wouldn't answer. I had asked her that question several times, over the years, and got answers ranging from "There was nobody of your caliber to annoy" to "The food in the Buttery sucked." There has always been something enigmatic about Cassie. This is one of the things I like in her, and I like it all the more for being, paradoxically, a quality that isn't readily apparent, elusiveness brought to so high a level it becomes almost invisible. She gives the impression of being startlingly, almost childishly open—which is true, as far as it goes: what you see is in fact what you get. But what you don't get, what you barely glimpse: this is the side of Cassie that fascinated me always. Even after all this time I knew there were rooms inside her that she had never let me guess at, let alone enter. There were questions she wouldn't answer, topics she would discuss only in the abstract; try to pin her down and she would skim away laughing, as nimbly as a figure skater.

"You're good," Sam said. "Degree or no degree."

Cassie raised one eyebrow. "Wait and see if I'm right before you say that."

"Why did he keep her for a day?" I asked. This had been bothering me all along—because of the obvious hideous possibilities, and because of the nagging suspicion that, if he hadn't needed to get rid of her for some reason, he might have kept her for longer, kept her forever; she might have vanished as silently and finally as Peter and Jamie had.

"If I'm right about all the other stuff, the distancing himself from the crime, then it wasn't because he wanted to. He would've wanted to get rid of her as soon as possible. He kept her because he didn't have a choice."

"He lives with someone and had to wait till they were out of the way?"

"Yeah, could be. But I was wondering if maybe the dig wasn't a random choice. Maybe he had to dump her there—either because it's part of whatever grand plan he's following, or because he doesn't have a car and the dig was the only place handy. That would fit in with what Mark said about not seeing a car go past—and it would mean the kill site's somewhere very nearby, probably in one of the houses at that end of the estate. Maybe he tried to dump her on Monday night, but Mark was there in the woods, with his fire. The killer could have seen him and been scared off; he had to hide Katy and try again the next night."

"Or the killer could have been him," I said.

"Alibi for Tuesday night."

"From a girl who's mad about him."

"Mel's not the ditzy stand-by-your-man type. She's got a mind of her own, and she's plenty smart enough to realize how important this is. If Mark had jumped out of bed halfway through the action to take a nice long walk, she'd have told us."

"He could have an accomplice. Either Mel or someone else."

"And what, they hid the body on the grassy knoll?"

"What's your boy's motive?" Sam inquired. He had been eating cherries and watching us with interest.

"His motive is he's several hundred yards out of his tree," I told him. "You didn't hear him. He's perfectly normal on most things—normal enough to reassure a kid, Cass—but get him talking about the site and he starts going on about sacrilege and worship… The site's under threat from this motor-way: maybe he thought a nice human sacrifice to the gods, just like old times, would get them to step in and save it. When it comes to this site, he's batty."

"If this turns out to be a pagan sacrifice," Sam said, "dibs I not be the one to tell O'Kelly."

"I vote we get him to tell O'Kelly himself. And we sell tickets."

"Mark is not batty," Cassie said firmly.

"Oh, he is, too."

"He is not. His work is the center of his life. That's not batty."

"You should have seen them," I told Sam. "Honestly, it was more like a date than an interrogation. Maddox nodding away, fluttering her eyelashes, telling him she knew exactly how he feels—"

"Which I do, actually," Cassie said. She abandoned Cooper's notes and pulled herself backward onto the futon. "And I did not either flutter my eyelashes. When I do, you won't miss it."

"You know how he feels? What, you pray to the Heritage God?"

"No, you big eejit. Shut up and listen. I have a theory about Mark." She kicked off her shoes, tucked her feet up under her.

"Oh, God," I said. "Sam, I hope you're not in a hurry."

"I always have time for a good theory," Sam said. "Can I have a drink to go with it, if we've finished working?"

"Wise move," I told him.

Cassie shoved me with her foot. "Find whiskey or something." I slapped her foot away and got up. "OK," she said, "we all need to believe in something, right?"

"Why?" I demanded. I found this both intriguing and mildly disconcerting; I am not religious, and as far as I knew Cassie wasn't either.

"Oh, because we do. Every single society in the world, ever, has had some form of belief system. But now…How many people do you know who're Christian—not just going to church, but actually Christian, like trying to do things the way Jesus would've? And it's not like people can have faith in political ideologies. Our government doesn't even have an ideology, as far as anyone can tell—"

"'A Little Something for the Boys,'" I said, over my shoulder. "That's an ideology, of sorts."

"Hey," said Sam mildly.

"Sorry," I said. "I didn't mean anyone specific." He nodded.

"Neither did I, Sam," said Cassie. "I just meant there isn't one overall philosophy. So people have to make their own faith."

I had found whiskey, Coke, ice and three glasses; I juggled them all back to the coffee table in one go. "What, you mean Religion Lite? All those New Age yuppies having tantric sex and feng shui-ing their SUVs?"

"Them, too, but I was thinking of the people who make a religion out of something completely different. Like money—actually, that's the nearest thing the government has to an ideology, and I'm not talking about bribes, Sam. Nowadays it's not just unfortunate if you have a low-paid job, have you noticed? It's actually irresponsible: you're not a good member of society, you're being very very naughty not to have a big house and a fancy car."

"But if anyone asks for a raise," I said, whapping the ice tray, "they're being very very naughty to threaten their employer's profit margin, after everything he's done for the economy."

"Exactly. If you're not rich, you're a lesser being who shouldn't have the gall to expect a living wage from the decent people who are."

"Ah, now," Sam said. "I don't think things are that bad."

There was a small, polite silence. I collected stray ice cubes from the coffee table. Sam by nature has a Pollyanna streak, but he also has the kind of family that owns houses in Ballsbridge. His views on socioeconomic matters, though sweet, could hardly be considered objective.

"The other big religion these days," Cassie said, "is bodies. All those patronizing ads and news reports about smoking and drinking and fitness—"

I was pouring, looking at Sam for a signal to stop; he lifted a hand, smiled at me as I passed him the glass. "Those always make me want to see how many cigarettes I can fit in my mouth at once," I said. Cassie had stretched her legs across the futon; I moved them out of the way so I could sit down, put them back across my lap and started making her drink, lots of ice and lots of Coke.

"Me, too. But those reports and stuff aren't just saying things are unhealthy—they're saying they're morally wrong. Like you're somehow a better person, spiritually, if you have the right body-fat percentage and exercise for an hour a day—and there's that awful condescending set of ads where smoking isn't just a stupid thing to do, it's literally the devil. People need a moral code, to help them make decisions. All this bio-yogurt virtue and financial self-righteousness are just filling the gap in the market. But the problem is that it's all backwards. It's not that you do the right thing and hope it pays off; the morally right thing is by definition the thing that gives the biggest payoff."

"Drink your drink," I said. She was lit up and gesturing, leaning forward, her glass forgotten in her hand. "What does this have to do with batty Mark again?"

Cassie made a face at me and took a sip of her drink. "Look: Mark believes in archaeology—in his heritage. That's his faith. It's not some abstract set of principles, and it's not about his body or his bank account; it's a concrete part of his whole life, every day, whether it pays off or not. He lives in it. That's not batty, that's healthy, and there's something seriously wrong with a society where people think it's weird."

"The guy poured a fucking libation to some Bronze Age god," I said. "I don't think there's anything particularly wrong with me for considering that a little odd. Back me up here, Sam."

"Me?" Sam had settled back into the sofa, listening to the conversation and reaching out to finger the tumble of shells and rocks on the windowsill. "Ah, I'd say he's just young. He should get himself a wife and a few kids. That'd settle him."

Cassie and I looked at each other and started to laugh. "What?" Sam demanded.

"Nothing," I said, "honestly."

"I'd love to get you and Mark together over a couple of pints," Cassie said.

"I'd soon sort him out," Sam said serenely, sending Cassie and me into a fresh fit of giggles. I leaned back into the futon and took a sip of my drink. I was enjoying this conversation. It was a good evening, a happy evening; soft rain was pittering at the windows and Billie Holiday was playing in the background and I was glad, after all, that Cassie had invited Sam. I was starting to like him a lot more actively. Everyone, I decided, should have a Sam around.

"Do you seriously think we can eliminate Mark?" I asked Cassie.

She sipped her drink, balanced the glass on her stomach. "Actually, I honestly do," she said. "Regardless of the battiness question. Like I said, I get this very strong sense that whoever did this was in two minds about it. I can't imagine Mark being in two minds about anything—at least, not anything important."

"Lucky Mark," Sam said, smiling at her across the coffee table.

* * *

"So," Sam asked, later, "how did you and Cassie meet?" He leaned back on the sofa and reached for his glass.

"What?" I said. It was sort of a weird question, out of the blue like that, and to be honest I had half-forgotten he was there. Cassie buys good booze, silky Connemara whiskey that tastes like turf smoke, and we were all a little tipsy. The conversation was starting, comfortably, to ebb. Sam had been stretching to read the titles of the battered paperbacks on the bookshelf; I had been lying back on the futon, thinking about nothing more taxing than the music. Cassie was in the bathroom. "Oh. When she joined the squad. Her bike broke down one evening and I gave her a lift."

"Ah. Right," Sam said. He looked slightly flustered, which wasn't like him. "That's what I thought at first, sure: that you hadn't met before. But then it seemed like you'd known each other for ages, so I just wondered were you old friends or…you know."

"We get that a lot," I said. People tended to assume we were cousins or had grown up next door to each other or something along those lines, and it always filled me with a private, unreasonable happiness. "We just hit it off well, I suppose."

Sam nodded. "You and Cassie," he said, and cleared his throat.

"What'd I do?" Cassie demanded suspiciously, shoving my feet out of the way and sliding back into her seat.

"God only knows," I said.

"I was only asking Rob whether the two of ye knew each other before you joined Murder," Sam explained. "From college or something."

"I didn't go to college," I said. I had a feeling that I knew what he had been going to ask me. Most people do ask, sooner or later, but I hadn't had Sam down as the inquisitive type, and I wondered why, exactly, he wanted to know.

"Seriously?" Sam said, startled and trying not to show it. This is what I mean about the accent. "I thought Trinity, maybe, and you had classes together, or…"

"Didn't know him from Adam," Cassie said blandly, which after a frozen instant sent her and me into helpless, snorting, juvenile giggles. Sam shook his head, smiling.

"One as mad as the other," he said, and got up to empty the ashtray.

* * *

I had told Sam the truth: I never went to college. I came out of my A-levels, miraculously, with a B and two Ds—enough to have got me into some course somewhere, probably, except that I hadn't even filled in an application form. I told people I was taking a gap year, but the truth was that I wanted to do nothing, absolutely nothing, for as long as possible, maybe for the rest of my life.

Charlie was going up to London to study economics, so I went with him: there was nowhere else I particularly needed or wanted to be. His father was paying his share of the rent on a sparkly apartment with hardwood floors and a doorman, and there was no way I could afford my half, so I got a dingy little bedsit in a semi-dangerous area and Charlie got a flatmate, a Dutch exchange student who would be going home at Christmas. The plan was that by then I would have a job and be able to join him, but long before Christmas it became clear that I wouldn't be moving anywhere—not just because of money, but because I had, unexpectedly, fallen in love with my bedsit and my private, free-floating, wayward life.

After boarding school, the solitude was intoxicating. On my first night there I lay on my back on the sticky carpet for hours, in the murky orange pool of city glow coming through the window, smelling heady curry spices spiraling across the corridor and listening to two guys outside yelling at each other in Russian and someone practicing stormy flamboyant violin somewhere, and slowly realizing that there was not a single person in the world who could see me or ask me what I was doing or tell me to do anything else, and I felt as if at any moment the bedsit might detach itself from the building like a luminous soap bubble and drift off into the night, bobbing gently above the rooftops and the river and the stars.

I lived there for almost two years. Most of the time I was on the dole; occasionally, when they started hassling me or when I wanted money to impress a girl, I spent a few weeks working in furniture removals or construction. Charlie and I had, inevitably, drifted apart—starting, I think, with his look of polite, horrified fascination when he first saw the bedsit. We met for pints every couple of weeks, and sometimes I went to parties with him and his new friends (this is where I met most of the girls, including angsty Gemma with the drink problem). They were nice guys, his friends from uni, but they spoke a language I neither knew nor regretted, full of inside jokes and abbreviations and backslapping, and I found it hard to make myself pay attention.

I'm not sure what exactly I did for those two years. A lot of the time, I think, nothing. I know this is one of the unthinkable taboos of our society, but I had discovered in myself a talent for a wonderful, unrepentant laziness, the kind most people never know after childhood. I had a prism from an old chandelier hanging in my window, and I could spend entire afternoons lying on my bed and watching it flick tiny chips of rainbow around the room.

I read a lot. I always have, but in those two years I gorged myself on books with a voluptuous, almost erotic gluttony. I would go to the local library and take out as many as I could, and then lock myself in the bedsit and read solidly for a week. I went for old books, the older the better—Tolstoy, Poe, Jacobean tragedies, a dusty translation of Laclos—so that when I finally resurfaced, blinking and dazzled, it took me days to stop thinking in their cool, polished, crystalline rhythms.

I watched a lot of TV, too. In my second year there I became fascinated with late-night true-crime documentaries, mostly on the Discovery Channel: not with the crimes themselves, but with the intricate structures of their unraveling. I loved the taut, steady absorption with which these men—sharp FBI Bostonians, potbellied Texas sheriffs—carefully disentangled threads and joined jigsaw pieces, until at last everything fell into place and the answer rose at their command to hang in the air before them, shining and unassailable. They were like magicians, throwing a handful of scraps into a top hat and tapping it and whipping out—flourish of trumpets—a perfect, silken banner; only this was a thousand times better, because the answers were real and vital and there were (I thought) no illusions.

I knew it wasn't like that in real life, at least not all the time, but it struck me as a breathtaking thing to have a job where even that possibility existed. When, all in the same month, Charlie got engaged and the dole informed me they were cracking down on people like me and this guy with a thing for bad rap music moved in downstairs, it seemed like the obvious response to go back to Ireland, apply to Templemore Training College and start becoming a detective. I didn't miss the bedsit—I think I had been starting to get bored anyway—but I still remember those marvelous, self-indulgent two years among the happiest times of my life.

* * *

Sam left around 11:30; Ballsbridge is only a few minutes' walk from Sandymount. He gave me a quick, questioning look as he pulled on his coat. "Which way are you walking?"

"You've probably missed the last DART," Cassie told me easily. "You can crash on my sofa if you want."

I could have said I planned to take a taxi home, but I decided she had probably called it right: Sam wasn't Quigley, we wouldn't come in the next day to a gleeful little flurry of smirks and single entendres. "I think I have, actually," I said, checking my watch. "Would that be all right?"

If Sam was startled, he covered it well. "See ye in the morning, then," he said cheerfully. "Sleep tight."

"He fancies you," I told Cassie, when he had left.

"God, you're predictable," she said, digging in the wardrobe for the spare duvet and the T-shirt I keep there.

"'Oh, I want to hear what Cassie has to say, oh Cassie you're sooo good at this—'"

"Ryan, if God had wanted me to have a horrible pubescent brother, he would have given me one. Also your Galway accent sucks."

"Do you fancy him, too?"

"If I did, I would have done my famous trademark trick where I tie a cherry stem in a knot with my tongue."

"You do not either. Show me."

"I was joking. Go to bed."

We pulled out the futon; Cassie turned on the bedside lamp and I switched off the overhead light, leaving the room small and warm and shadowy. She found the knee-length T-shirt she sleeps in and took it into the bathroom to change. I tucked my socks into my shoes and pushed them out of the way under the sofa, stripped to my boxers, pulled on my T-shirt and settled myself under the spare duvet. We had the routine down pat by this time. I could hear her splashing water on her face and singing to herself, something folk-songy I didn't recognize, in a minor key. "To the Queen of Hearts is the Ace of Sorrow, he's here today, he's gone tomorrow…" She had pitched it too low; the bottom note disappeared into a hum.

"Do you really feel that way about our job?" I asked, when she came out of the bathroom (small bare feet, smooth calves muscled like a boy's). "The way Mark feels about archaeology?"

I had been saving the question till Sam left. Cassie gave me a quizzical little sideways grin. "I have never poured booze on the squad-room carpet. Cross my heart."

I waited. She slid into bed and leaned up on one elbow, her cheek on her fist; the glow of the bedside lamp edged her with light, so that she looked translucent, a girl in a stained-glass window. I wasn't sure she was going to answer, even without Sam there, but after a moment she said, "We're dealing with truth, finding truth. That's serious business."

I thought about this. "Is that why you don't like lying?" This is one of Cassie's quirks, especially odd in a detective. She omits things, eludes questions with open mischief or so subtly you hardly notice her doing it, spins misleading phrases with a conjurer's expertise; but I had never known her to lie outright, not even to a suspect.

She shrugged, one-shouldered. "I'm not very good with paradox."

"I think I am, actually," I said thoughtfully.

Cassie rolled over onto her back and laughed. "You should put that in a personal ad. Male, six foot, good with paradox—"

"—abnormally studly—"

"—seeks his very own Britney for—"

"Ewww!"

She cocked an eyebrow at me, innocently. "No?"

"Give me some credit. Britney is exclusively for those with cheap tastes. It would have to be Scarlett Johansson at least."

We laughed, subsided. I sighed comfortably and arranged myself around the sofa's familiar quirks; Cassie reached out one arm to turn off the lamp. "Night. Sleep tight."

"Sweet dreams."

Cassie sleeps as lightly and easily as a kitten; after a few seconds I heard her breathing slow and deepen, the tiny catch at the top of each breath that told me she had drifted off. I am the opposite: once I'm asleep it takes an extra-loud alarm clock or a kick in the shins to wake me, but it can be hours of tossing and fidgeting before I get there. But somehow I always found it easier to sleep at Cassie's, in spite of the lumpy, too-short sofa and the grouchy creaks and ticks of an old house settling for the night. Even now, when I'm having trouble falling asleep, I try to imagine myself back on that sofa: the soft, worn flannel of the duvet cover against my cheek, a spicy tang of hot whiskey still warming the air, the tiny rustles of Cassie dreaming across the room.

A couple of people clattered into the house, shushing each other and giggling, and went into the flat downstairs; peaks of conversation and laughter filtered up, faint and muffled, through the floor. I matched the rhythm of my breathing to Cassie's and felt my mind sliding pleasurably down into dreamy, nonsensical tangents—Sam was explaining how to build a boat, and Cassie was sitting on a window ledge between two stone gargoyles and laughing. The sea is several streets away and there was no way I could have heard it, but I imagined I did all the same.

Загрузка...